In many American cities there are ice cream and frozen yogurt shops on every block. For example, Baskin Robbins has over 6,700 store locations worldwide in almost 50 different countries. The technology for ice cream manufacturing, however, did not show up overnight.
On this day, May 30th, in 1848, W.G. Young of Baltimore, Maryland, patented the ice-cream freezer.
Five years earlier, Nancy Johnson invented the first hand-cranked ice cream maker. The mechanism consisted of an outer bowl filled with ice and salt to freeze the mixture and an inner bowl to hold the ingredients. She sold the patent rights to Young who then marketed the machine as the “Johnson Patent Ice-Cream Freezer.”