Purple Cow

Grape soda and vanilla ice cream in a purple float named for Gelett Burgess' 1895 poem — one of the most widely quoted American verses of the late 19th century.

The Purple Cow is an American soda fountain float whose name and cultural identity are inseparable from a specific piece of American literary humor. Gelett Burgess, a San Francisco-based writer, designer, and editor, published a short whimsical quatrain called The Purple Cow in the first issue of his literary magazine The Lark in May 1895: I never saw a purple cow, I never hope to see one; But I can tell you anyhow, I'd rather see than be one. The verse became one of the most widely quoted American poems of the late 19th century — reprinted in newspapers and magazines across the country, memorized by schoolchildren, and translated internationally — and Burgess reportedly grew to despise his own creation, later writing that he would rather be killed than have written it. The poem's whimsy and its color imagery made it a natural reference for the soda fountain culture that was simultaneously flourishing across American drugstores: the combination of grape soda and vanilla ice cream produces a purple-tinted float that literalized the poem's impossible visual. Grape soda had been commercially produced in the United States since at least the 1870s, with Welch's and other producers making grape-flavored carbonated drinks widely available. The float format — ice cream in soda — had been developed by Robert Green in Philadelphia in 1874. The Purple Cow combined both into a float that has remained a children's soda fountain staple for over a century.