An ice cream cone is a cone-shaped pastry, similar in texture to a waffle, in which ice cream is served, permitting it to be eaten without a bowl or spoon.
Paper and metal cones were used in the 1800s in France, Germany, and England for eating ice cream. The edible ice cream cone is popularly believed to have been invented in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1904 at the 1904 World's Fair, with the popular story being that a pastry maker came to the aid of a neighboring ice cream vendor who was running out of dishes by folding a waffle-like pastry into a cone that could hold ice cream. Numerous men who sold pastries at the World's Fair claimed to have been the inventor of the ice cream cone, citing numerous inspirations.
However, some attribute its invention to a New Yorker named Italo Marchiony, who on December 13, 1903 received a patent on an ice cream cone-like invention he had been selling since 1896. A recipe for a similar pastry appeared in an English cookbook in 1888.
Nevertheless, the ice cream cone became popular in 1904 in St. Louis, with more than 50 vendors copying the idea, and within a few years, the ice cream cone was being sold nationwide. The first cones were rolled by hand, but in 1912, Frederick Bruckman, an inventor from Portland, Oregon, patented a machine for rolling ice cream cones. He sold his company to Nabisco in 1928.History
