Daily Tech Snippet: Tuesday, January 3

• Two reasons the red Solo Cup is a marvel of modern engineering: The red Solo Cup is an elegant piece of technology. It's easy to forget when you find them strewn across the room, half-filled with leftover beer or crushed underfoot from parties the night before. But what many take for granted as simply a cheap, disposable beverage holder is the result of careful, beautiful engineering by people such as Robert Hulseman. While regular users may admire the Solo Cup's lightness and balance, particularly when filled to the brim with libation, some of the most underappreciated aspects of the cup can be traced to a simple design aimed at solving a rather sticky problem. Before the invention of the Solo Cup as we know it, it was often difficult to remove one disposable cup from a whole stack because of the way they sometimes clung together, and designs aimed at eliminating the issue resulted in production irregularities that drove up costs and increased the likelihood of cup breakage. For a thing whose whole job is to hold other things, this outcome simply would not do. Enter the plastic Solo Cup, which won a patent in 1976. Described as "an expendable thin walled cup for liquids and the like," the Solo Cup offered two key innovations that, according to the company, helped solve the sticking associated with large stacks of cups as well as the hard problem of cleanly removing the plastic cups from the production molds.One of the Solo Cup's distinguishing features, according to the patent, was the curved lip of each cup (see 10a in Fig.3). When several cups were stacked together, the lips would "engage" — to use the company's language — and rest upon each other, keeping one cup from sinking too tightly into the next. But, Solo Cup Co. observed, this helped create another problem. When cups like these were subjected to crushing forces from various angles, the bottoms could warp in ways that actually made it harder to separate the cups. So the bottoms had to be reinforced (see Fig. 4, Fig. 6 and 26-28 in Fig. 3). This is how the plastic Solo Cup gained indentations or divots in the base that made the bottoms more rigid and allowed for more air flow between each stacked cup, which allegedly had the side benefit of helping the cups come apart.