An Ex-Google Engineer Just Reinvented the Measuring Cup

Recognizing a problem most people didn’t even know they had, former Google and Facebook software engineer Joshua Redstone has made a bold claim for his recent Kickstarter venture: He’s developed a better measuring cup.

According to the Boston Business Journal, Redstone spent four years tinkering with a solution to something that had long annoyed him as an amateur chef: Traditional measuring cups, which are stocky and not very well tapered, don’t do a great job of accurately measuring their own contents. Redstone believes the shape of a cup determines its success, particularly when a cook overfills a liquid or solid by a tiny amount. The smaller the volume, the more the problem is magnified.

Redstone’s cup, Euclid, resolves the issue. According to the Kickstarter page: “With traditional measuring cups, the smaller the amount, the harder it is to measure accurately. The culprit? The shape. Straight sides magnify errors when measuring lower down in the cup. Some have tried to solve this problem with conical measuring cups, but their results fall short of Euclid’s by up to 60 percent. Euclid is the only measuring cup with a mathematically optimal, tapered design for consistent accuracy across amounts.”

Euclid soared past its $30,000 Kickstarter goal. Backers can pay $24 for the cup now, or wait until it’s available at retail for a slightly higher price to be determined. The cup is scheduled for release in May 2018.