Ice cream float

An ice cream float or ice cream soda, also known as a spider in Australia and New Zealand, is a chilled beverage that consists of ice cream in either a soft drink or a mixture of flavored syrup and carbonated water. When root beer and vanilla ice cream are used together to make the beverage, it is typically referred to as a root beer float (United States and Canada). A close variation is the coke float, using cola instead of root beer. History The ice cream float was invented by Robert McCay Green in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1874 during the Franklin Institute's semicentennial celebration. The traditional story is that, on a particularly hot day, Green ran out of ice for the flavored drinks he was selling and used vanilla ice cream from a neighboring vendor, inventing a new drink.His own account, published in Soda Fountain magazine in 1910, states that while operating a soda fountain...