Ice cream cones are an American invention - at least, they were invented in America. The original source of the concept is up for debate. Generally the story goes that a waffle vendor was next to an ice cream vendor at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. When the ice cream vendor ran out of cups, the waffle vendor - a Syrian named Ernest A. Hamwi, who sold a crispy pastry actually known as zalabis - rolled his product into a cone to hold the ice cream.
This is not the first time an ice cream cone was seen in the US, though. The idea was patented in New York in 1903, a full year earlier by an Italian man named Italo Marchiony, who is said to have been making the cones since 1896. The ideas were independently conceived, but it is interesting to note that the time was clearly the right one for the ice cream cone.
St Louis, as a town, is the reason for the success of the cones. Bakeries with special equipment started to produce the then-named cornucopia cones. As factories looked for easier ways than hand-rolling to produce the cones, batter-based cones, which were poured into molds and are now often known as sugar cones, were developed. Sales of cones of all kinds took off and the rest, as they say, is history.
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