History of Potato Chips: Who Invented Potato Chips?
Like many great inventions, debate continues regarding who invented it first. Was it the Wright Brothers or Gustave Whitehead who first took flight? Was the telephone first invented by Alexander Graham Bell or Elisha Gray? Did Guglielmo Marconi send the first radio signal, or was it Nicola Tesla? The same can be said for one of America’s greatest culinary delights, the potato chip.
How Were Potato Chips Invented?
The most popular potato chip legend begins on a day in 1853, when shipping and railroad baron Cornelius Vanderbilt was dining at Moon’s Lake House Restaurant, which was a popular eating establishment in the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York. Disappointed by the fried potatoes he’d been served, Vanderbilt sent them back to the kitchen, asking for more thinly sliced ones in return. Famed African American chef, George Crum, took offense to Vanderbilt’s complaint, slicing some potatoes as thin as he could before frying them to crispy perfection. Vanderbilt loved the result, and the potato chip was born. The Vanderbilt/Crum story eventually became so well-accepted that American Heritage Magazine dubbed Crum the “Edison of Grease.”
Three years later, when Catherine Adkins Wicks passed away a 103, her obituary indicated that she was the inventor of the potato chip. Wicks, who was Crum’s sister, worked alongside him in the kitchen and was affectionately known as Aunt Kate or Aunt Katie. In one variation of the disgruntled diner story, it was she, not her brother, who made the invention, when she accidentally dropped a super-thin slice of potato into a fat frier while peeling potatoes, fishing it out when it was golden brown before savoring the result.
Wicks wasn’t the only posthumous claimant to the potato chip’s invention, for in Hiram S. Thomas’ 1907 obituary, he was widely credited as “the inventor of Saratoga chips.” A prominent Black hotelier referred to in one obituary as one of the most well-known African Americans in the northeast, Thomas ran Moon’s Lake House for about a decade. However, that was in the 1890s, some 40 years after Crum and Wicks’ disputed discovery—a good decade after the chips had become commercially available far beyond Saratoga Springs.
Despite multiple claims of the invention, the one common link for the birth of potato chips is the Moon’s Lake House Restaurant, which sadly closed in 1983 after burning to the ground for the fourth time in its long heritage. According to potato chip consumption reports, 86% of people in both the United States and France eat potato chips on a regular basis, while Great Britain is close behind at 84%. According to historian Greg Daugherty at history.com, Americans consume an estimated 11.2 million pounds of potato chips on Super Bowl Sunday alone.