Did you know...
Who invented the ice cream cone?
Italo Marchioni came to America through Ellis Island in 1895 from the Dolomite Mountains. He changed his name on the end from the "i" to a "y" because back then Italians suffered from discrimination so the "y" made the name appear French.
The Marchiony family settled in New York when he bought a push cart and went up and down Wall Street selling lemon ice in oversized whiskey shot glasses. His one man business was an instant success so he got another push cart and his first employee. This became a success and led to another and then another until he had a fleet of 50 push carts. But washing the glasses was time consuming and the breakage was expensive. One day he folded a paper cone and put the ice in it. The word spread and lines formed at his cart, for the new way eliminated the need to return the glass. But picking up the empty paper that his customer's threw away was becoming a problem. Then early in 1903 he thought of the edible cone, experimenting with various kinds of pastry and dough, but Marchiony kept on thinking. He was also a mechanical genious. He rented a garage where he developed a machine to bake the cones. This saved time and it was another instant success. The push carts were disbanded and he moved to New Jersey where he set up a factory for the new cones. By 1924 the annual ice cream cone production reached a record of 245 million and the machines were capable of producing about 150,000 cones every 24 hours!
Italo Marchiony died in 1954 at the age of 86. Another Italian hero!!