A Dentist Co-Invented the Cotton Candy Machine, and It Was Sold at the 1904 World's Fair as Fairy Floss

US618428 was filed on December 28, 1897, by William J. Morrison and John C. Wharton, and granted on January 31, 1899. The Patent Office title is Candy-Machine. Morrison was a dentist in Nashville, Tennessee. Wharton was a confectioner.

The machine they patented made cotton candy, and the fact that one of its inventors was a dentist is the part everyone remembers.

Spun sugar before the machine

Spun sugar was not new. European pastry cooks had been making it by hand for a long time, heating sugar until it melted and then flicking or drawing it out with a fork or whisk into fine threads that hardened in the air. It was used to decorate elaborate desserts.

It was also slow, skilled, and hot work, and it produced small amounts. Spun sugar was something served at expensive tables, not something sold by the paper cone.

What the machine does

Morrison and Wharton's machine mechanizes the whole process, and the principle is simple once you see it.

Sugar goes into a small heated head at the center of the machine, where it melts. The head spins rapidly, and centrifugal force drives the liquid sugar outward through very fine holes in its wall.

The streams that come out are so thin that they cool almost instantly in the surrounding air. They cool so fast that the sugar does not have time to form crystals. It solidifies as a glass, in threads finer than a human hair, which drift outward and collect in a large bowl around the spinning head. An operator gathers the web of threads onto a stick or into a container.

That is why cotton candy dissolves the moment it touches your tongue. It is sugar glass in extremely thin strands, with a huge surface area, and most of the volume of a serving is air. A portion that looks large contains much less sugar than its size suggests.

The 1904 World's Fair

The candy reached a mass audience at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904. It was sold there as Fairy Floss, in small boxes, at a price considered steep for a sweet. It sold anyway, in large numbers. The figure usually cited is more than 68,000 boxes over the course of the fair.

The same fair, and the same crowds, are part of the tangled history of another food that became a fixture, covered in our story on the ice cream cone.

A second dentist

The name cotton candy took over in the 1920s. A New Orleans dentist named Josef Lascaux is often credited with building a similar machine around that time and with popularizing the new name, which makes two dentists in a story about spun sugar. His role is less well documented than Morrison's.

The early machines were temperamental and prone to breaking down. Later designs made the machines reliable enough to run all day at a carnival or ballpark, which is where cotton candy settled permanently.

About the dentist

It is tempting to read something cynical into a dentist co-inventing a pure sugar confection. There is no evidence Morrison saw it that way, and the simpler explanation is that he was an inventive man with a partner who knew candy, and the two of them saw a way to mechanize something that had always been done by hand. Morrison's career as a dentist continued, and the machine was one enterprise among several.

What they built is still recognizable in every cotton candy machine in use: a heated spinning head, a ring of tiny holes, and a bowl to catch what flies out.

See the original

The full text and figures of US618428 are on patents.us.