Phones were ringing off the hook Friday with calls to buy The Hic-Cup, an invention created by Doylestown’s Phil Ehlinger to stop the hiccups, after a 15-year-old Florida girl who had hiccups for more than five weeks told the “Today Show” that the device helped cure them.

Jennifer Mee said Ehlinger’s patented metal cup was one of the countless remedies she used to stop her rapid hiccups. They finally stopped on their own Wednesday.

“We’ve had our highest record sales today,” Ehlinger said. “We’ve been getting desperate calls from people.”

The Hic-Cup “cup” is stainless steel. A brass anode — a stem that looks like a straw — is connected to the side via a plastic clip that keeps the metal pieces from touching. Filled with water, it works like a very low-voltage battery.

When a user drinks out of the cup, the top of the brass anode contacts the user’s temple. That completes a circuit that sends a maximum charge of 150 mili-volts — 1,000 times less than an average static shock — into the vagus nerve as it passes through the temple. That tiny charge, which can’t be felt, is enough in many cases to stop hiccups.

It may be on store shelves by the fall, Ehlinger said. The company is negotiating with Walmart, Kmart and other retailers to sell the cups in their stores. Negotiations were in the works before Mee used the cup, he said.

phillyBurbs.com