The History of the Ice Cream Cone: How It Was Born

The history of the ice cream cone is one of those food stories where nobody quite agrees on the ending. Ask ten sources and you'll get a New York patent, a heat-struck afternoon in St. Louis, and at least half a dozen men each certain they rolled the first wafer into a cup. Here's what the records actually support, who deserves credit for what, and why the cone we hold today was less a single invention than a good idea whose time arrived all at once.

Before the cone: ice cream needed a better dish

For most of the nineteenth century, ice cream on the street was served in something called a "penny lick" - a small glass the vendor filled, the customer licked clean, and the vendor refilled for the next person, often without washing it. It was as unhygienic as it sounds, and by the early 1900s cities were moving to ban the practice over disease fears.

That pressure is worth holding onto. The edible container wasn't a whimsical flourish; it solved a real, urgent problem. Whoever worked out how to hand someone ice cream in something they could eat afterward was solving for hygiene, breakage, and washing-up all at once. Several people arrived at that solution within a few years of each other - which is exactly why the credit is so tangled.

The patent: Italo Marchiony, New York, 1903

If you want a paper trail, it leads to Italo Marchiony (his surname is also spelled Marcioni in some records), an Italian immigrant who sold lemon ices from a pushcart in New York City. By most accounts he was shaping edible cups as early as 1896, tired of customers wandering off with - or breaking - his glassware.

On September 22, 1903, Marchiony filed for a U.S. patent, and in December 1903 he was granted it. The important nuance: his patent covered a molding apparatus - a hinged, waffle-iron-like device that baked several small edible cups at once - rather than the cone shape we picture today. His were closer to flat-bottomed cups than the pointed cornucopia. Still, this is the earliest hard documentation of a mass-produced edible ice cream holder in the United States, which is why Marchiony is so often called the cone's inventor.

Two honest caveats keep this from being a tidy origin story:

• A patent proves a filing date, not that no one else had the same idea. Edible wafers served with ice cream appear in European cookbooks and street trade well before 1903.
• Marchiony's device made cups. The rolled, hand-held cone - the thing that made the format famous - has its own, separate, and much noisier origin story.

The 1904 St. Louis World's Fair: the moment it went mainstream

The scene almost everyone knows takes place at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, across a famously hot summer. The most-repeated version stars Ernest Hamwi, a young Syrian immigrant selling zalabia - a thin, waffle-like Middle Eastern pastry - at a concession near the ice cream stands. As the story goes, a neighboring ice cream vendor ran out of dishes, Hamwi rolled one of his warm wafers into a cone, the pastry cooled and stiffened in seconds, and the vendor spooned ice cream on top. In Hamwi's own recollection, "This idea seemed to go over big," and soon concessions across the fairgrounds were buying his rolled waffles.

Hamwi went on to build a business out of it, later founding a waffle-cone company. But here's the catch that any careful account has to make: he was one of several vendors at the same fair who told nearly identical stories, and there's no contemporary paper trail that settles it.

The other claimants - and why they all sound plausible

The fair was crowded with wafer-and-waffle sellers, many of them recent immigrants working stalls beside ice cream counters. Over the years, the following names have all been put forward as the cone's "inventor":

Claimant	Background	The claim
Ernest Hamwi	Syrian immigrant, zalabia vendor	Rolled a warm waffle when a neighbor ran out of dishes
Abe Doumar	Lebanese immigrant	Turned a penny waffle into a ten-cent cone by adding ice cream
Charles & Frank Menches	Ohio concessionaires	Baked waffles and wrapped them around a cone-shaped form
Nick & Albert Kabbaz	Syrian vendors	Sold rolled-waffle cones at the fair
David Avayou	Turkish immigrant	Said he'd seen edible cones in France and recreated them
Arnold Fornachou	Ice cream vendor	The stand that reportedly ran out of dishes

Notice the pattern. These aren't wild, competing inventions - they're variations on the same moment: a wafer maker and an ice cream seller standing side by side on a hot day, improvising a container. That's not a contradiction to explain away; it's the actual history. When a solution is that obvious and that needed, several clever people find it at once. There is no contemporary evidence that lifts one story above the rest, and reputable food historians are comfortable leaving it that way.

So who invented the ice cream cone?

The most accurate answer splits the credit two ways:

• For the documented, patented edible holder: Italo Marchiony, New York, 1903 - for the machine-made cup.
• For the rolled cone as a mass phenomenon: the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair - not a single person, but a cluster of vendors whose collective improvisation, seen by roughly twenty million fairgoers, turned a novelty into a national habit.

The cleanest way to say it: the fair didn't invent the cone so much as introduce it to America all at once. A patent gives you priority; a World's Fair gives you a country full of customers. Both matter, and conflating them is where most tellings of this story go wrong.

It's also why the cone gets its own day on the calendar. National Ice Cream Cone Day is marked each September 22 - the date tied to Marchiony's 1903 patent filing - a small, fitting nod to the man with the paperwork, even as the summer of 1904 gets the folklore.

FAQ

Who really invented the ice cream cone?

There isn't one clean answer. Italo Marchiony holds the earliest U.S. patent (1903) for a device that made edible ice cream cups, while the rolled cone was popularized by multiple vendors at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, with no single one provable as first.

What was served at the 1904 World's Fair - cones or cups?

Rolled cones. Vendors like Ernest Hamwi curled warm, waffle-like pastries (such as zalabia) into cone shapes to hold ice cream, which is the format that stuck and spread nationally after the fair.

Did the 1904 World's Fair invent the ice cream cone?

No - it popularized it. Edible ice cream holders predated the fair, including Marchiony's 1903 patent, but the fair's massive crowds turned the cone from a local novelty into a coast-to-coast staple.

When is National Ice Cream Cone Day?

September 22, a date linked to Marchiony's 1903 patent filing. It's the traditional day to credit the cone's paper-trail inventor, even though the cone's fame really took off in 1904.

The takeaway

The cone endures because it's honest engineering: no dish to wash, no glass to break, nothing left over but a happy hand. That practical little idea has carried ice cream for more than a century - and at Donzel we've been part of that long tradition since 1984, back when we were still Dairy Don (that whole the Donzel story is worth a read). These days the cones, waffle bowls, and 250-plus creations live at our outlets, where a scoop is best judged in person. If you're the sort who reads a cone's origin story to the end, you'll fit right in - come find a scoop worth its history, or visit an outlet near you.