5 November 1894, Hallowe’en Party, Apples, liquid, fresh and sweet, were present too, and their little brown jug with its drinking-straws was pleasantly patronized in its quaintly retired corner.
9 January 1911, The bureau of manufactures, department of commerce and labor, has a communication from an American business house which states it has been purchasing drinking-straws abroad, but would like to make purchases in the home market.
1911, Drinking-straws, Receptacle for dispensing.
1923, The above-described mechanism may be employed only for making bags; preferably, however, this mechanism is associated with the mechanism, comprising a drum 69, for charging each bag with cigarettes, matches, drinking-straws, or the like, and for closing the mouth of the bag.
1937, The English Duden: Picture Vocabularies in English with English and German Indices, drinking-straw 423 ... 7 the beaker with the drinking-straws
1947, Problems investigated for manufacturing industries included, among many others, the deterioration of wax used for the impregnation of drinking-straws, the identification of a special lubricant for a crankshaft-grinding machine, comparison of dry-cleaning solvents, an explosion in a degreasing plant, an explosion in a railway signal lamp, fire hazard in disinfection of aircraft cabins, and deterioration of hydraulic hoses in aircraft.
1948, w:Alex Faickney Osborn, Your Creative Power: How to Use Imagination, She turned her mind to “what instead?†and hit on drinking-straws as substitutes for flame-makers.
22 December 1977, Tim Eiloart, For enterprising spirits, Each team needs a separate room, 60 pins and 60 plasticdrinking-straws.
1984, w:Peter Reading, C, Here are some of the things you’ll need if it takes place at home: bed-care utensil set (inc. denture cup, kidney basin, bed pan &c.), large sheet of plastic, rented wheelchair, box of flexible drinking-straws, one bag disposable bed pads (the incontinent will use considerably more), large size disposable diapers (several boxes), thermometer, one bottle ethyl alcohol, cotton balls, lubricant, commode, a great many spare undersheets, six wash-cloths.
1988, w:Margaret Atwood, w:Cat's Eye (novel), We’re issued small bottles of milk which we drink through straws stuck in through a hole in the cardboard bottle tops. These are my first drinking-straws, and they amaze me. ... We make complicated floral patterns with a compass, we glue odd substances to cardboard backings: feathers, sequins, pieces of macaroni garishly dyed, lengths of drinking-straw. ... Apart from the still lifes, what I’m showing is mostly figurative, although there are a couple of constructions made from drinking-straws and uncooked macaroni, and one called Silver Paper.
7 February 1997, Laura, the ever so politically correct neighbour, feels that single-parent Gordon should join the local “Mums and Toddlers†group when she notices Daniel using his drinking-straw as a gun.
16 March 1997, Barry Wigmore, I Work or I Die, With dogged determination, sucking air through a contraption like a restricted drinking-straw, he built up his lung-power — a few seconds, then minutes, now he can go hours without the ventilator.
29 October 1997, Christopher Morley, Birthday warms the heart, Nieper’s rapt, plaintive, slightly jazz-inflected and beautifully controlled Rachmaninov Vocalise was a show-stopping highlight, but we also treasure the memory of George Caird snipping a drinking-straw progressively shorter as he played, illustrating how length governs pitch.
11 December 1997, Numbers, Eleven is also the number of: ... recorded accidents in UK homes in 1994 involving drinking-straws.
12 March 1998, Tom Kemp, These boys — they’re a riot, They were blowing paper pellets at each other through their drinking-straws, stuffing handfuls of crushed ice down the backs of each other’s shirts and dropping chips dipped in tomato ketchup on the floor.
13 February 2000, Terry Marotta, Memorable Valentine’s Days, The strip, which was key, resembled what a kid makes with the paper his drinking-straw comes in, folding it into a bunchy little caterpillar on which he then releases water, drop by drop, to see it expand and take on movement.
4 November 2000, Susannah Herbert, Save the front page, Both books pushed realism so far that it touched on surrealism, and both freeze-framed the present moment, compensating for their plotlessness by chronicling in loving detail the minutiae of late-20th-century life — the way the light falls on the handrail of a moving escalator, the design flaws of drinking-straws that, annoyingly, float instead of standing upright.
27 May 2001, w:Giles Smith, Giles Smith on Television, Sophie Dahl pushed back the barriers of fashion modelling by not resembling a teak-stained drinking-straw.
15 September 2002, w:Robert Matthews (scientist), Sometimes you have to grasp at straws to keep your children amused, If you use one of those bendy drinking-straws – with the shorter end stuck in a glass held above another glass – sucking on the lower end of the straw sets up a stream of fizzy liquid flowing up and out of the higher glass and into the other, in defiance of the law of gravity.
3 May 2003, w:Cintra Wilson, Drunen royals and a sanitized Hillary, Buckingham is the Party Palace! They should get their crowns fitted with beer-cozies and those crazy drinking-straws.
3 September 2003, Kathleen Flynn, Pros Have Supporting Roles in Scriptwriting Sessions, In one, a boy wanted to fulfill his dreams, but he happened to be a drinking-straw living in a Sizzler in Detroit.
21 August 2004, The 50 Best Buys, A drinking-straw snakes up and out of the pack and ends in a hands-free valve.
6 January 2006, Gerard Gilbert, The feast of Stephen, There’s no sign of the famous drinking-straw he carries to fiddle with, but it’s probably as well that he doesn’t smoke.
2011, w:Marco Frascari, Eleven Exercises in the Art of Architectural Drawing: Slow Food for the Architect’s Imagination, Make your own marking tools (pencils and pens that have been produced industrially are not allowed), for instance it is possible to use drinking-straws or stirrers cut into quill pens.
