Who invented Chocolate Chip Cookies?

These cookies were invented in 1930 by Ruth Wakefield. She and her husband Kenneth bought an old house in Whitman, Massachusetts which had been originally used as a toll house. They opened it as a restaurant and inn, calling it Toll House. Mrs. Wakefield used a popular recipe of the day called "Butter Drop-Do" and decided to add some chopped chocolate to it. She thought the chocolate would melt and run throughout the cookies, and she was surprised when the pieces stayed in chunks instead. The cookies became so popular that the Nestle Company manufactured semisweet morsels expressly for the Toll House Cookies and printed a copy of the recipe on each package.

SOURCE: Maida Heatter's Book of Great Chocolate Desserts p. 161