For people on the go, travel mugs are an important tool to carry. However, two inventors made it even more useful by making the lid open and close automatically, reports DailyPress.com.
The hole that you sip from automatically opens and closes, which means no more fiddling with the lid while driving or otherwise occupied. When you lift the mug to drink, the hole opens. When you set it down, it closes.
“It’s all weights, gravity and angles,” Herbie Morewitz said of the plastic design. “There’s no electronics.”
It seems basic, but for the two non-scientists, it took a lot of trial and error to get it working just right.
“We would cut up pizza boxes and use Scotch tape and a pencil to work on prototypes,” Cory Morewitz, 28, said. “We would call each other at midnight and say, ‘Do you think this will work?'”
Even after they designed more serious prototypes, it took five attempts of sending it to a custom manufacturer in Fredericksburg — at $1,000 for each prototype — to get it working correctly.
Photo by Aaron Parecki