Want to know how the ice-cream cone went from the dessert plates of snooty Frenchmen into the fist of some rocky-road-smeared toddler at Baskin-Robbins? Here’s the scoop, plus a few other tidbits of 20th-century ice-cream history.

1770s

Wafer cornets filled with candies, fruit pastes, and creams are served as desserts at fancy dinners throughout Europe.

1807

An engraving by French artist Louis-Philibert Debucourt shows a woman licking ice cream from a wafer cone or cone-shaped holder at the Paris café Frascati.

1850s–1890s

Street vendors in New York sell ice cream in penny licks—small glass containers that must be returned to the vendors after consumption. Breakage is always a problem. Meanwhile, over in London, vendors start to experiment with different containers for their half-penny ices.

1903

New York italian-ice vendor Italo Marchiony patents a mold for a handheld, edible pastry cup that many people believe to be the United States’s first ice-cream cone or at least an important precursor. However, because his pastries have a flat base rather than a cone-shaped one, he loses later lawsuits claiming that ice-cream-cone makers stole his idea.

1904

Ice-cream cones are invented at the St. Louis World’s Fair, probably by Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian immigrant. When his neighbor, an ice-cream vendor, ran out of bowls to give to customers, Hamwi shaped his zalabia—a flat Middle Eastern pastry—into edible cones. But several other vendors claim to have had the same idea before or at the same time Hamwi did, so the question of who deserves the credit remains hazy. All that’s known for sure is that by the end of the fair, more than 50 stands were selling these World’s Fair cornucopias.

1905

Abe Doumar, another Syrian immigrant, builds the first-ever ice-cream-cone machine. The modified waffle iron makes four cones at a time and is still in use at Doumar’s Cones and Barbecue, a restaurant Abe’s brother founded in 1934 in Norfolk, Virginia.

1914

Wafer-like cake cones show up as an alternative to waffle cones in US ice-cream shops. Early ads emphasize that they’re made in a sanitary factory instead of being hand-rolled.

1999

Richard B. Hartman files a patent for a motorized ice-cream cone. No word on whether it was this design that was eventually tested, mass-produced, and featured on Kathie Lee & Hoda in 2009.

2011

A team of seven gelato artisans completes the world’s largest ice-cream cone in Rimini, Italy. It stands a little more than 9 feet, 2 inches tall and consists of an internal wafer cone set inside a larger white-chocolate cone, which is decorated with 2,000 wafer biscuits.

Photo by Stephanie Bassos, Groupon.