An Eleven-Year-Old Left His Soda on the Porch Overnight and Invented the Popsicle

US1505592 was granted to Frank W. Epperson on August 19, 1924. The title is "Frozen Confectionery." Epperson was forty-one when he filed it. He had invented the thing when he was eleven.

The origin is the kind of story that sounds invented and appears to be true, because Epperson told it consistently for decades. In 1905, in San Francisco, he was mixing a drink of the sort children made then — flavored soda powder stirred into water — and left the cup on the back porch overnight with the wooden stirring stick still standing in it. The night was unusually cold. In the morning he found the drink frozen solid around the stick, pulled it out by the handle, and ate it.

He called it the Epsicle, a portmanteau of his own name and icicle, and made them for friends for years without doing anything commercial about it.

Eighteen years

The gap between the accident and the patent is the strange part. Epperson grew up, became a real-estate agent in Oakland, married, and had children. It was his own kids, by his account, who kept asking for "Pop's sicles" and eventually pushed him to sell them properly.

He began selling them at an amusement park at Neptune Beach in Alameda in the early 1920s, and filed his patent in 1923. The claims cover the essential thing: a frozen confection on a handle, with the handle embedded during freezing so that the whole article can be eaten without a dish or a spoon. It sounds trivial until you notice that before it, eating something frozen required sitting down with equipment.

The name became Popsicle, from the children's version, and Epperson trademarked it.

Selling it

Here the story turns familiar. Epperson ran into financial difficulty during the 1920s and, needing money, sold the rights to the Joe Lowe Company of New York. He later called it the worst decision of his life and said publicly that he had sold it for a song.

The product went on to be an enduring commercial giant — hundreds of millions of units a year at its peak, and a brand name so dominant that "popsicle" became the generic American word for any frozen pop on a stick.

There is one more twist that belongs to the era. During the Great Depression, the company introduced the twin-stick Popsicle — two sticks, a scored center, one nickel — so that two children could split a single treat. It was a Depression-era product decision that survived for decades afterward as a design quirk nobody could quite explain, long after the reason for it had passed.

See the original

The full text and figures of US1505592 are on patents.us.