120 years ago today, Charles E. Menches, a concessionaire from Ohio, allegedly invented and sold the first ice cream cone at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. Facing a dwindling supply of serving dishes, Menches allegedly approached a fellow vendor, Ernest A. Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant selling a wafer-thin pastry called zalabia. Charles rolled a still-warm zalabia into a cone shape, and filled it with ice cream. The rest, as they say, is history.

In the years that followed, numerous other vendors made competing claims of inventorship, and today we may never know if Menches claim is correct. The year before the Fair Italo Marchiony patented a mold for making an edible serving dish for ice cream, but these looked more like teacups than a cone.

In 1905, a year after the Fair, Lanier and Driesbach filed an application on a Confection Apparatus, which issued as U.S. Patent No. 839,488 on Christmas Day 1906. The pair received a second patent (U.S. Patent No, 919,601) on an improved apparatus a few years later.

Menches never patented the ice cream cone, although a few years after the Fair, he did receive U.S. Patent No. 924,484 on a Baking Iron for Ice Cream Cones:

Menches, and his brother Frank, are also credited by some with the invention of the hamburger, at the 1885 Erie County Fair in Hamburg, New York, although that claim is even more suspect.

Menches ice cream cone story, if true, proves the old adage that necessity is the Mother of invention.