The Ice Cream Cone Mold Gets a Patent
On this day · 15 December 1903
On a December day in 1903, a Wall Street pushcart vendor secured the patent that helped give ice cream its edible holder.
On December 15, 1903, the U.S. Patent Office issued Patent No. 746,971 to Italo Marchiony, an Italian immigrant who sold lemon ices from a pushcart on Wall Street. His invention was a hinged metal mold for shaping baked, edible cups to hold his frozen treats, freeing him from the daily chore of washing and chasing down borrowed glassware.
Marchiony filed the application that September, calling it “a molding apparatus for forming ice-cream cups and the like.” The drawings show small cups with tiny handles rather than the pointed cone we picture today, but the device pressed batter into consistent shapes that baked crisp.
The patent protected the mold, not the cone itself, a distinction that would later cost Marchiony his infringement lawsuits.
The edible cone soon exploded in popularity at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, where multiple vendors sold rolled wafers filled with ice cream. Marchiony is widely credited as a pioneer of the form, even though his patent secured only the molding machinery behind it.
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