WHO INVENTED THE ICE CREAM SODA?
Paul Dickson 1
1 The Great American Ice Cream Book (New York: Atheneum, 1973)
The generally acknowledged creator of the ice cream soda is Robert M. Green, who fathered it in October, 1874, at the semicentennial celebration of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia, where he was a concessionaire selling soda fountain drinks from a three-foot-square dispenser. At the beginning of the exhibition he was serving a popular drink of the time which was mixture of sweet cream, syrup and carbonated water. During one of the early days of the celebration, however, he ran out of cream and began substituting vanilla ice cream. The customers gave their hearty approval to the new drink as evidenced by the fact that Green, who had been averaging $6 a day with the first drink, was taking in over $600 a day for ice cream sodas by the end of the exhibition. Green went on to make a fortune as a soda manufacturer, and when he died in 1920 his will called for a large monument to be erected over his grave with the inscription: ORIGINATOR OF THE ICE CREAM SODA.
