Slurpee

The Slurpee exists because a soda fountain broke. In the late 1950s, soda-fountain operator Omar Knedlik started stashing bottles of soda in his freezer when his fountain gave out, discovered customers loved them slushy, and went on to invent machines purpose-built to make frozen carbonated drinks. 7-Eleven licensed the technology from The Icee Company in a 1965 agreement — on the conditions that it use a different name and sell the drink only in its own US stores — and began pouring in 1966. The name came from Bob Stanford, a 7-Eleven ad agency director, who coined 'Slurpee' after the sound made when drinking one.

The drink became the convenience store's signature: a wall of humming machines swirling half-frozen slush in flavors from cherry and Coca-Cola to blue raspberry, dispensed by kids into domed cups until the machine sputtered. Early flavor names leaned gloriously weird — Pink Fink, Moonshine, Gully Washer, Redeye — and the ritual never changed across the decades: the too-fast pull on the straw, the stabbing brain freeze, the pledge to sip slower next time, broken within the minute.

For 90s kids it was the taste of an unsupervised summer afternoon, the reward at the end of a bike ride with pocket change. 7-Eleven eventually turned its own address into a holiday: every July 11 — 7/11 — stores give away free Slurpees, originally in a cheeky 7.11-ounce cup. The chain says more than 11.6 million Slurpees are now consumed around the world every day, which works out to an awful lot of brain freeze, willingly repeated.