Inventing tasty new snacks and treats can be a serious science. So much so that fast food brands play around with odd fast food ingredients in order to perfect everything from dough to sausage patties. Yet sometimes, formidable foods come together by total accident — for example, the popsicle.
The story, described both on Popsicle’s official website and in other independent sources, goes like this: Back in 1905 in the Bay Area of California, 11-year-old Frank Epperson left a glass of water mixed with powdered soda mix (like Kool-Aid) outdoors. Perhaps most importantly, Epperson also used a wooden stick to stir the mixture, leaving that stick in the glass. It was left outside on a particularly cold night, so the mixture froze. Epperson then poured hot water over the glass, the frozen blob popped out attached to the stick, and the popsicle was born.
Epperson certainly wasn’t the first person to combine ice and sugar. Crushed ice-and-syrup concoctions date back to ancient Roman times (which is also where an early version of the hamburger originated). His innovation was the addition of the stick, making the treat handheld with no need for utensils. It took a while for Epperson to run with his idea, though. For years, he only made them for his friends and his own children. We can thank his kids for the name “popsicle:” Epperson had been calling the frozen treats “Epsicles,” combining “Epperson” and “icicle,” but his kids thought up the more appealing “Popsicle,” based around “pops” meaning “dad.”
Did Epperson invent it or just get credit?
The concept of frozen ice on a stick isn’t that complicated, so it should come as little surprise that there are other Popsicle-like creations that seem to predate Epperson’s story. There are records from the 1870s indicating that a pair of men who went by Ross and Robbins had sold a frozen fruit concoction on a stick, called Hokey Pokey (no relation to the beloved New Zealand ice cream of the same name). Around the time of Epperson’s accidental discovery, an unspecified company was also developing so-called “frozen suckers.” There are also indications that the dates in the Epperson story are wrong, based on the fact that no below-freezing temperatures were recorded in the Bay Area in 1905, although it’s likely that the accidental invention simply happened a couple of years later.
In any case, it’s Epperson who is typically accepted as the inventor, probably because he had the good fortune or sense to patent his idea. He started selling “Epsicles” at a Bay Area theme park in the 1920s, and had enough success to patent the concept in 1924. But Epperson didn’t end up getting rich from it. The Great Depression left him broke and he sold the patent rights to a company called Lowe Co., who turned the popsicle into a household name. But Epperson did still live to see its success, dying in 1983, by which point he was well-known as the original inventor.
