July 23 is:
National Hot Dog Day
Vanilla Ice Cream Day
1829 – William Austin Burt patented the typographer, a precursor to the typewriter.
The Province of Canada was created by the Act of Union of 1840. It abolished the legislatures of Lower Canada and Upper Canada and established a new political entity, the Province of Canada, to replace them.
1866 Cincinnati Baseball club (Red Stockings) forms.
Death of Ulysses S. Grant, eighteenth President of the United States. He was born Hiram Ulysses Grant. Grant was president from 1869 to 1877. He had invested all his savings in a banking firm in which one of his sons was a partner. The firm went bankrupt in 1884 and the Grants lost all their money. Broke and sick with throat cancer, Grant undertook to write his memoirs for magazine serialization. At times he would fall unconscious from coughing fits and hemorrhages. He managed to complete the series just weeks before he died at his home in Mount McGregor, New York, on July 23, 1885. Mark Twain had the memoirs published in book form and turned over a half million dollars’ profit to the Grant family.
1904 Ice cream cone created during St Louis World Fair:
Per Wikipedia:
At the St. Louis World’s Fair in 1904, a Syrian/Lebanese concessionaire named Arnold Fornachou was running an ice cream booth. When he ran short on paper cups, he noticed he was next to a waffle vendor by the name of Ernest Hamwi, who sold Fornachou some of his waffles. Fornachou rolled the waffles into cones to hold the ice cream – and this is believed by some (although there is much dispute) to be the moment where ice-cream cones became mainstream.
Abe Doumar and the Doumar family can also claim credit for the ice cream cone. At the age of 16, Doumar began to sell paperweights and other items. One night, he bought a waffle from another vendor transplanted to Norfolk, Virginia from Ghent in Belgium, Leonidas Kestekidès. Doumar proceeded to roll up the waffle and place a scoop of ice cream on top. He then began selling the cones at the St. Louis Exposition. His “cones” were such a success that he designed a four-iron baking machine and had a foundry make it for him. At the Jamestown Exposition in 1907, he and his brothers sold nearly twenty-three thousand cones. After that, Abe bought a semiautomatic 36-iron machine, which produced 20 cones per minute and opened Doumar’s Cone’s and BBQ In in Norfolk, Virginia, which still operates at the same location over 100 years later.
Charles E. Menches was an ice cream salesman at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, the great fair in St. Louis, Mo. Whenever Menches visited a certain lady friend, he brought a bouquet of flowers. On one occasion, for a super date, he brought flowers and an ice cream sandwich. Because his lady friend lacked a vase for the flowers, she took one of the sandwich layers and curled it into the form of a vase. Then she rolled the other layer to contain the ice cream itself–and the ice cream cone was born.
In 2008, the ice cream cone became the official state food of Missouri
1929 – The Fascist government in Italy banned the use of foreign words.
July 23, 1989, FOX-TV tops ABC, NBC and CBS for 1st time (America’s Most Wanted)