Popsicles?

by Two Chums on March 18, 2022

Do you know how popsicles came into being?

A dessert accidentally created by a California kid has managed to stick around for over a century. One frigid night in the San Francisco Bay area, young Frank Epperson took a glass of water and mixed in a sweet powdered flavoring using a wooden stirrer. He left the concoction on his family’s back porch overnight, and by morning, the contents had frozen solid.

Epperson ran hot water over the glass and used the stirrer as a handle to free his new creation. He immediately knew he’d stumbled on something special, and called his treat an Epsicle, a portmanteau of his last name and “icicle.”

Throughout his life, Epperson claimed that this experiment occurred in 1905, when he was 11 years old. While most publications agree, the San Francisco Chronicle’s website counters that local temperatures never reached freezing in 1905; they did, however, in nearby Oakland, where the Epperson family moved around 1907, meaning the fateful event may have happened a few years later.

In 1922, after Epperson had married and started working in real estate, he brought his frozen treat — which had since become beloved by friends and neighbors — to the Fireman’s Ball at Neptune Beach amusement park. It was a hit.

Within two years, he had patented his ice pop on a wooden stick. Around the same time he began referring to his desserts as “popsicles” (a play on his children’s term for their father’s creation, “pop’s sicle”), but the word was absent from his patent, and a Popsicle Corporation quickly established itself elsewhere.

“I should have protected the name,” Epperson later confessed. Although he briefly set up a royalty arrangement with the Popsicle Corporation, by 1925 he sold his patent rights to the Joe Lowe Company, which became the exclusive sales agent for the Popsicle Corporation.
Over the decades, Epperson’s naming oversight cost him considerable profits.

As of 2020, the global ice pop market was valued a $4.7 billion.

That was surely a find!

With summer approaching, I am sure we will all think of this story as we enjoy our “ice lollies”!

Here’s to new inventions!