In 1897, a dentist named William Morrison teamed up with a candy maker named John Wharton to invent a machine that would melt sugar and spin it into fine, fluffy threads. The threads cooled into a soft, sticky cloud - what we now call cotton candy. It was originally sold under the name “fairy floss.”
Morrison and Wharton brought their machine to the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis and sold over 68,000 boxes of fairy floss at 25 cents each. That was a small fortune at the time, and word spread fast. Soon every carnival and circus in America had a spinning cotton candy machine.
The funny part is that cotton candy is basically pure sugar - exactly the stuff dentists usually try to keep you away from. A serving looks huge but contains less sugar than a can of soda, because it’s mostly air. Morrison apparently saw no problem with this. Maybe he liked the extra business.
