Origin
Although many believe the inventor of the cocktail party was Alec Waugh of London, an article in the St. Paul Pioneer Press in May, 1917, credited its invention to a certain Mrs. Julius S. Walsh Jr. of St. Louis, Missouri.
Mrs. Walsh invited 50 guests to her house on a Sunday at high noon for a one-hour affair. "The party scored an instant hit," the newspaper declared and stated that, within weeks, cocktail parties had become "a St. Louis institution".
Alec Waugh noted that the first cocktail party in England was hosted in 1924 by war artist Christopher Nevinson.
Read more about this topic: Cocktail Party
Famous quotes containing the word origin:
“Our theism is the purification of the human mind. Man can paint, or make, or think nothing but man. He believes that the great material elements had their origin from his thought.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The essence of morality is a questioning about morality; and the decisive move of human life is to use ceaselessly all light to look for the origin of the opposition between good and evil.”
—Georges Bataille (1897–1962)
“We have got rid of the fetish of the divine right of kings, and that slavery is of divine origin and authority. But the divine right of property has taken its place. The tendency plainly is towards ... “a government of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich.””
—Rutherford Birchard Hayes (1822–1893)