Surely that won¿t catch on! First ever cup holder shows how sometimes the best inventions aren't recognised for years First patent for a cup holder was filed in the U.S. in February 1950 But it wasn't until the Eighties that car makers included them as standard They are an essential feature of cars that we often take for granted, so it might come as a surprise that cup holders took more than 30 years to catch on after they were first invented. Although the potentially disastrous effects of spilling scalding hot coffee on to your lap as you hurtle down the motorway at 90mph are obvious to anyone, it wasn't until the Eighties that car makers began to include them as standard. In fact, food blog Bon Appetit reports, designers in the early days of car production worked under the assumption that drivers would actually take a break from their journeys to eat and drink. The site has published a comprehensive history of the cup-holder dating back to the original patent by its inventor, Jack Fazakerley of Los Angeles, filed in February 1950, and earlier. Seems like a good idea: These diagrams are from Jack Fazakerley's original patent for a car cup holder. Filed in 1950, it took the automobile industry more than 30 years to include holders as standard in their products The early patent drawings are almost unrecognisable from the cup holders found in every modern car From the days of the Ford Model T, companies marketed after-market accessories to enable American drivers to eat and drink while on the move. The Ford gadget section of Twenties editions of the Sears catalogue had gastronomic accessories as comprehensive as an entire kitchenette which attached to the Model T's running boards, complete with an ice-box, larder and a a door which opened with drop legs to form a convenient table. But it was as drive-ins and drive-thru windows became a mainstay of U.S. cuisine in the Fifties that real demand for cup holders began to pick up, Sam Dean writes for Bon Appetit. He finds the earliest suggestion of a modern-style cup holder in a 1950 newspaper clipping which describes a 'Snack Tray' for a car which hangs from the dashboard, attached by two suction cups. The design includes a tray on which to rest your mid-drive snack, with two cut-out discs hanging from chains to hold a bottle of pop or glass of something else. Perhaps it was that invention that inspired the 1950 Fazakerly patent, which brought the first indication of how the cup holders we know today might look. Pop-out mechanism: This patent filed by Clyde Morgan offers the first precursor to the slide-out cup holders that most cars come equipped with these days E-readers may be a relatively new phenomenon but historians claim a Spanish teacher first came up with the idea more than 60 years ago. Forward-thinking Ángela Ruiz Robles invented her Mechanical Encyclopedia in 1949 - more than half a century before the advent of Kindles, Kobos and Nooks. Her main goal was to reduce the weight of books in students' school bags, and she firmly believed the gadget would make reading more accessible to all. The device worked with pressurised air, allowing readers to add different spools containing the pre-loaded content. It may be well away from the current format of downloading books from the internet, but in a world without the web it was deemed revolutionary. Ruiz, who was at the time aged 54, applied for a patent. Her rather concise application said: 'It has some coils where you place the books that you want to learn in whatever language. By a movement of the same [the coils] it passes over all the topics, making it stop where you would like it to. It also reportedly had a 'zoom' function where readers could focus in on a particular area of the text. Sadly, the mother-of-three's invention never reached the market as she could not find the right level of funding for her project. Whatever the inspiration, the Fifties seemed to bring a wave of cup holder innovation, with Fazakerley's '28504 patent was published just two months before Clyde Morgan of Dallas filed a patent for a precursor to the modern pop-out cup holder. The Refreshment Tray for Automobile Instrument Panel, patent number 2745705, filed in May 1953, included two 'wells to receive beverage bottles or the like and retain them in an upright position even during movement of the automobile.' Car manufacturers soon began to respond to growing demand, but their built-in proto-cup holders were little more than indentations in the plastic of glove compartment doors. One innovator was Cadillac, Bon Appetit points out, whose Eldorado Brougham shipped from the factory with a magnetised glove compartment door designed to securely hold a set of four metal tumblers. 'Perfect for keeping your cognac stable while you're passing the jitney on the way to the Hamptons,' quips Mr Dean. The Sixties say the emergence of trays that would hook into the window well of car doors, which by the Seventies had become common after-market accessories. It wasn't until 1983, with Chrysler's invention of the minivan, that built-in cup holders began their march to ubiquity. The Dodge Caravan and Plymouth Voyager, were the first to roll from the assembly line with two effective cup holders ready sunk into the dashboard and, over the next few years, rival car makers slowly began to follow suit. But then the need for the cup holder was proven in an infamous lawsuit, Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, known as the hot coffee lawsuit. Said by some to be an example of frivolous litigation, it was brought by 79-year-old Stella Liebeck from Albuquerque, New Mexico, after she was left with third-degree burns when she spilled coffee from a McDonald's drive-thru on herself. Mr Dean writes on Bon Appetit: 'The case became fodder for endless Leno monologues and a national argument about tort reform, but it was also a strong argument for industry-wide adoption of the cup holder - if the car she'd been sitting in, her grandson's Ford Probe, had had even one single cup holder, the whole ordeal might have been avoided.'