Ice cream scoops
Alfred L. Cralle was born on Sept. 4, 1866, in Kenbridge, Lunenburg County, Virginia, just after the end of the Civil War. He attended local schools, worked for his carpenter father, and got interested in mechanics.
Cralle’s African American parents sent him to Washington D.C. where he attended Wayland Seminary, a branch of the National Theological Institute, one of a number of schools founded by the American Baptist Home Mission Society immediately after the Civil War to help educate newly freed African Americans.
Eventually Cralle left the school and Washington, D.C. for Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His first job there was as a porter at both a drugstore and at a hotel in Pittsburgh.
He noticed ice cream servers found it difficult to get the popular ice cream from a spoon onto a cone or into a small dish neatly. Seeing that the ice cream tended to stick to the utensils, Cralle created a device now known as the ice cream scoop, since no one wanted to help the ice cream along to its destination with a finger, as one might do at home.
Cralle’s first ice cream scoop invention was originally called an “ice cream mold and disher,” and it also worked to serve rice and other foods without them sticking to the utensil.
From his early interest in mechanics, he eventfully added a mechanism to the scoop to squeeze with a thumb to scrape the food out of the scoop and onto its destined dish or cone. That is the one for which he applied for and received a patent on Feb. 2, 1897. At just age 31, he was granted U.S. Patent No. 576395 for the “mold and disher.” It is the third highest ice cream scoop and nearest the door on the mobile.
Cralle became a successful business promoter in Pittsburgh as well. He was popular and became assistant manager of the Afro-American Financial, Accumulating, Merchandise and Business Association in Pittsburgh when local Black investors created the innovative organization.
Cralle never actually profited much from his invention because its fame and subsequent improvements spread so quickly that no one remembered he had invented the original, even though he had the patent.
Later in 1920, Cralle was killed in an automobile accident in his adopted hometown of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Back in 1876, George William Clewell had invented a conical device with a screw at the top that was supposed to release the ice cream but didn’t.
You can see both Craille’s and Clewell’s inventions at the top of this mobile.