September 22, 2025

— "Here's a little!" called out by Italian pushcart vendors on the streets of Manhattan at the turn of the last century.

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Patent No. 746,971

About 60,000 Italian immigrants arrived at Ellis Island in 1895, each carrying dreams of reinvention in America. Among them was a 27-year-old gelato maker named Italo Marcioni, from the tiny mountain village of Peaio.

In quick succession after his arrival:

• His last name was changed: the final "i" became a "y." (Was it his choice or an immigration officer's? We don't know.)
• He made his way to Philadelphia, where he met and married Elvira De Lorenzo.
• He came back east to Hoboken, N.J., where by summer 1896, he was pushing a cart loaded with gelato and lemon ices through the financial canyons of lower Manhattan.

Wall Street traders called the cart vendors "Hokey Pokeys," derived from how they called out "Ecco un poco!" (meaning "Here's a little!") as they walked down the street.

Marchiony became well known, and he credited part of his success to the fact that he served his gelato in elegant little liquor glasses. He soon was successful enough that he hired employees and had more pushcarts.

But then a problem emerged. People kept walking off with the glasses.

Get this ...

This turned into a real problem, and Marchiony was vexed trying to think of a solution. Each evening, he returned to his Hoboken apartment and pondered his dilemma.

He came up with a radical idea: What if he created -- get this -- an edible container?

No washing, no returns, no breakage. So, Marchiony began experimenting with waffle batter, working late into the night.

The key was timing. Fresh off the waffle iron, the batter was pliable. If he worked quickly—before it cooled and hardened—he could fold it into a cup shape. As it cooled, the waffle would hold its form.

Night after night, he refined the process in his flour-dusted kitchen. Soon, he was ready to test his creation.

Sure enough — it was another success. Traders loved the waffle cups—convenient, sanitary, and delicious.

September 22, 1903

Word spread through the financial district. Lines formed at Marchiony's cart. His sales tripled, then quadrupled.

By 1902, Marchiony had 45 pushcarts across Manhattan. When his business scaled, and when hand-making enough cups became impossible, he adapted a waffle iron design to create a machine that produced ten waffle cups at once.

He filed for intellectual property protection on September 22, 1903, receiving approval as Patent No. 746,971.

Marchiony had officially become the inventor of the edible ice cream container. Or at least, the inventor of the edible ice cream container-creating machine.

Then came the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis.

Wait, who is Arnold Fornachou?

The story most people have heard is that a man named Arnold Fornachou was selling ice cream at the fair, but ran out of dishes -- and that he turned to Ernest Hamwi, a vendor nearby selling waffle-like pastries.

Then, the two men rolled one of Hamwi's waffles into a cone shape for Fornachou to fill with ice cream.

The improvised "cornucopia" was a hit. Newspapers trumpeted the ice cream cone's "invention" at the World's Fair, crediting Hamwi.

But Marchiony had been mass-producing edible containers for nearly a decade by that point.

If the historical confusion bothered him, it didn't slow Marchiony down. He opened a factory in Hoboken soon after the exposition, manufacturing cones and wafers on an industrial scale.

Horse-drawn wagons bearing the Marchiony name supplied retailers across the Northeast. At peak capacity, his factory produced 150,000 cones every 24 hours.

By 1924, Americans were eating 245 million ice cream cones per year. Today, that number exceeds one billion.

Small moments of joy

Just for added measure, Marchiony also invented the ice cream sandwich -- reasoning that some small percentage of Americans back then felt undignified licking from a cone.

Fire destroyed Marchiony's factory in 1934, but unlike so many stories we've shared in which unsung inventors never really saw much financial upside, Marchiony was able to sell the rest of his business, and he walked away quite comfortably.

I don't know about you, but I really like ice cream. I also like that I can draw a line from Marchiony's arrival in the U.S. 130 years ago to a summer treat that makes my daughter very happy.

So here's to Italo Marchiony, one of the 60,000 who arrived in 1895, and whose broken dishes led to a sweet American tradition.

Every summer afternoon, every baseball game, every boardwalk stroll—his late-night kitchen experiments live on in billions of small moments of joy.

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7 other things to know this week ...

• Sunday September 21: "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit. Not a nasty, dirty, wet hole, filled with the ends of worms and an oozy smell, nor yet a dry, bare, sandy hole with nothing in it to sit down on or to eat: it was a hobbit-hole, and that means comfort." — FJ.R.R. Tolkien, opening line of "The Hobbit," which he wrote after scribbling this line on a blank exam paper he was grading, published on this day in 1937.
• Monday September 22: “As soon as I read in the paper that there was gonna be such a thing, I called my manager and said, 'I wanna do it.' And he said, 'It's all country.' I said, 'I don't care. It's America.'”— rock singer Sammy Hagar, talking about Farm Aid, which had its first event on this day in 1985.
• Tuesday September 23: “Nintendo's philosophy is never to go the easy path; it's always to challenge ourselves and try to do something new.” — Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of Super Mario and The Legend of Zelda, reflecting on the company founded by Fusajiro Yamauchi on September 23, 1889.
• Wednesday September 24: "It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat."— Fannie Farmer, from her famous cookbook, as she opened Miss Farmer's School of Cookery in Boston on September 24, 1902.
• Thursday September 25: "That Memorable Occurrences of Divine Providence may not be neglected or forgotten, as they too often are." — Benjamin Harris, explaining one of three reasons for publishing "Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick," America's first newspaper, on this day in 1690. It was shut down after just one issue by colonial authorities..
• Friday September 26: “I don't believe in big government, but I believe in effective governmental action.” — Senator John F. Kennedy, during the first televised presidential debate with Vice President Richard Nixon on this day in 1960. An estimated 60 to 70 million viewers watched what came to be known as "the Great Debates."
• Saturday September 27: "Whoever desires to serve as a soldier of God beneath the banner of the Cross in our Society, which we desire to be designated by the Name of Jesus..." —Opening line of the "Formula of the Institute," composed by St. Ignatius of Loyola and formally approved by Pope Paul III on this day in 1540, establishing the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits).