Italo Marchiony was granted a patent for ice cream cones on this day in 1903 after seven years of effort building a machine to produce them. Marchiony, an Italian immigrant who had made his way to New York City through Ellis Island in the early 1890s, paid his bills by selling flavored ice from a pushcart on Wall Street. He'd serve customers the treat in little glass cups that were arguably not up to the job, as they were both fragile and small enough to pocket and walk away with. His solution: an edible cup.
Marchiony's invention took off quickly with customers, to the point where production couldn't keep up with demand. To speed things up, in 1896 he started working on a cone-shaped waffle iron to reduce the labor going into each cone, and then built a machine that could make 10 at once.
Unfortunately for Marchiony, someone else quickly became known as the inventor of the ice cream cone. Ernest Hamwi was a waffle vendor at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, Mo., when he helped an ice cream maker who'd run out of glass cups by improvising a waffle cone. He was able to build a whole manufacturing business on the idea, while Marchiony's name got buried as he engaged in prolonged disputes over his patent.
You can read more about the ice cream cone's history at National Geographic.
