Even though it's cold and only the most naughty of fans are looking for ice cream options, it's the birthday of our favourite summer treat, or rather an accessory to it. A Cleveland gentleman, Carl Taylor, patented the ice cream cone making machine on this day in 1924, January 29. It's an invention that we don't understand, that no one had ever thought of before.
After obtaining the patent, Taylor said that he designed his „new and very useful” invention to press „thin, hot, freshly baked wafers into cone shapes, like the ones used to make ice cream. The cones spend enough time in the structure to cool, harden and keep their new shape,” explained Carl Taylor.
Taylor's invention, although an original idea, was intended as an addition. At the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, a Syrian-American chef named Ernest A. Hamwi suddenly rolled up a zalabia, a flatbread-like dish, when his friends Frank and Robert Menches ran out of serving dishes. Although some historians claim that the Menches brothers invented the ice cream cone, on June 1, 1920, Ernest A. Hamwi announced a funnel-making process. The text of this particular patent does not necessarily include the word „ice cream”, and it is thanks to this small detail that Carl Taylor was later able to register it under his own name.
Carl R. Taylor's ice cream cone-making machine was designed to be used in conjunction with Ernest A. Hamwi's machine. Taylor wrote in the patent application that „the machine herein shown is set up adjacent to the wafer machine in which the thin wafers to be formed into cones by the machine are baked.”
In any case, I think it's great that they invented the cone, because you can put ice cream in it. Because, as a Ugandan writer once said, „there is no sweet fruit that cannot be made even sweeter in the form of ice cream.”
