In 1931 — even before I was born — the “Lolly Pop” was officially registered to the Bradley Smith Company of New Haven by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The company had started producing its first Lolly Pops in 1907, but it took until 1931 to convince the patent office to grant an exclusive right to the name.
The name Lolly Pop was supposedly inspired by a racehorse that George Smith had seen at a local fair. Today, the word lollipop is a generic term, but the Bradley Smith Company was the first to apply it to a hard candy on a stick.
George Smith was supposedly inspired to make his candy on a stick by the success of a local confection called Reynolds Taffy — a chocolate caramel taffy on a stick. And the name Lolly Pop came from the name of a racehorse Smith had seen at a local fair.
But it turns out that the Patent Office found the term lollipop used in an English dictionary published in the early 1800s. The dictionary defined it as “a hard sweetmeat sometimes on a stick” — so, they refused Bradley Smith’s initial registration.
The trademark was finally granted after the company proved that Lolly Pop was an original spelling and its first use. During the long registration process many competitors used the name until Bradley Smith won. But over the years the term Lolly Pop and its other spelling Lollipop became interchangeable and it was so universally used that the trademark couldn’t be maintained.
The first Lolly Pops that Bradley Smith produced sold for a penny.
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