On July 23, 1904, the St. Louis World's Fair was sizzling under a Missouri summer sun. Twenty million visitors flooded the giant fairgrounds to see new wonders like Dr. Pepper, peanut butter, and electric lights. Inside, an ice cream vendor named Arnold Fornachou was scooping out cold, sweet treats so fast that he ran out of paper bowls. Customers were lined up, the heat was unbearable, and he was about to have to turn people away - until the man working the booth right next door had an idea.
That man was Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant selling thin, crisp Persian waffles called zalabia. He grabbed one of his fresh waffles, quickly rolled it into a cone shape, and handed it to Fornachou. The ice cream went on top. Within minutes, customers were happily licking ice cream out of edible cones - no bowls, no spoons, no mess. Word spread across the fair, and other vendors started copying the trick. By the end of the summer, the ice cream cone was a sensation.
There's actually a bit of an argument about who invented the cone first - Italian-American Italo Marchiony had patented a similar idea in New York the year before. But the St. Louis fair is what made cones famous worldwide. Today, around 17 billion ice cream cones are eaten every year around the planet, in flavors from chocolate chip to mango lassi to wasabi. The next time you're licking a cone on a hot summer day, you're enjoying a snack invented out of pure necessity on one sweltering afternoon in St. Louis.
