The inventor of the ice-cream cone is not known, although claims abound. There is ample evidence that the concept existed in several forms long before the debut of the cone at the St. Louis World's Fair in 1904. The benefit of the cone was that the ice cream container could be eaten, yet if one is to accept the research of Brian Butko (2001), there was considerable resistance to the idea when it first attracted public attention. Hygiene was one reason, sticky fingers another. The public perception of ice cream was that it should be clean, like milk itself, a food that was both basic and culturally defining. The ice cream parlor and the drugstore soda fountain probably did more to help the ice cream cone gain acceptability in the long run, but it was the carefully wrapped ice cream snacks of the 1920s that eventually captured the market.
That ice cream should assume its hallowed place beside the drug counter during Prohibition may seem at first glance the most remarkable of fates, but it was the original idea that ice cream was both safe and healthy that allowed it to invade the domain of the local apothecary. Temperance instilled Americans with a love of drugs as a substitute for luxury: patent medicines were mostly alcohol, and the tempering qualities of ice cream were not known to cause a Fourth of July picnic to degenerate into debauchery. Perhaps this is one reason why American ice cream evolved into yet another branch of frozen snacks during the 1920s. Perhaps it was also due to a shift in lifestyles and altruistic spin-offs geared toward Hollywood and a need to provide movie theaters with frozen finger foods. Whatever the reason, one of the most important additions to the ice cream story arrived in the form of ice cream "novelties," to use a term then current.