The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was held in St. Louis in 1904 in conjunction with the Olympic Games. 42 states and 53 nations took part in the exposition which celebrated the 100th Anniversary of the transfer of the northern part of Louisiana from France to the U.S. The exposition was popularly referred to as the St. Louis World’s Fair.
Among the vendors at the Fair was a man with an ice cream concession and another with a hot waffle booth. As the crowds surged through the exhibits both the ice cream and waffle business flourished. On one particularly active day, the waffle vendor ran out of cardboard plates upon which he had been serving his waffles, with three different kinds of topping. He was dismayed to discover that no one in the exposition would sell him plates to replenish his supply. All the other vendors jealously hoarded their inventories, fearing that they might lose money as well.
The ice cream vendor expressed delight over his fellow concessionaire’s plight. “That’s the way the old waffle crumbles,” he remarked. “It looks like you would be better off working for me selling ice cream.” The waffle vendor considered the alternative, which was attempting to serve his waffles without plates and watching the syrup run down the sleeves of his irate customers.
He agreed to buy ice cream from the ice cream vendor at a discount and resell it at his booth, which was located down the arcade. The waffle vendor tried to recoup his losses in the small profit margin he was making selling ice cream. His major problem was what to do with all the waffle batter ingredients in which he had invested his life savings to try to capitalize on the huge attendance at the St. Louis Fair.
Suddenly an idea struck him like a bolt of lightning out of the blue. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? He was certain it could work. At home the next day, with the help of his wife, the waffle vendor made a batch of one thousand waffles and pressed them thin with a flat iron. While they were still hot, he then rolled them into a circular pattern with a point at the bottom. The next morning he sold all of his ice cream before noon and all one thousand waffles, with three different toppings, as well! As a result of the stumbling block of running out of plates, he had been forced into inventing the “ice-cream cone.”
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Seeds of Greatness , by Denis Waitley, p. 194