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Drinking Straw Day is celebrated annually on January 3, the day Marvin Chester was awarded a patent for his innovation, i.e., the paper drinking straw, National Today reports.

The earliest form of straws was used by Ancient Sumerians almost 5,000 years ago. They submerged long and thin metallic tubes into big jars for brewing beer. The tube passed through the fermentation layers and went down to access the liquor at the bottom. These tubes brought the liquid upwards and into the mouth of the Sumerians.

In 1888, Marvin Stone, originally a paper cigarette holder manufacturer, became the first person to file for a drinking straw patent. Before the paper straw, there was the rye straw, and one day, while drinking a mint julep during a summer day, Stone didn’t like the aftertaste of the rye. He also noticed that the straw was beginning to disintegrate because of the liquid. This led him to think of designing a better straw. Stone started by wrapping strips of paper around a pencil and stuck them to it. He realized that these makeshift straws didn’t leave a grassy aftertaste and didn’t disintegrate easily, unlike the rye. Once the design was patented by 1890, his factory Stone Industrial began the commercial production of paper straws.

In the 1930s, bendable straws were invented by Joseph Friedman. Friedman used to watch his daughter struggle to drink her milkshake using the paper straw, so he came up with the bendable straw, in 1937, by adding a screw in the middle to make the straw easy to turn and adjust without breaking. By the 1960s, with the rise of fast food industries, plastic replaced paper because the cost of mass-producing plastic drinking straws was much lower.

The history, origin, and founder of Drinking Straw Day are widely unknown.