On the night Mariano Martinez opened his restaurant in Dallas in 1971, his bartenders nearly quit. The blended margaritas were coming out different every single time — some icy, some half-melted, some barely cold — and the crowd was not having it. Martinez went home, couldn’t sleep, and walked to a 7-Eleven the next morning for coffee. A little girl was pulling a Slurpee from a machine. That was the moment.
He went back, modified a soft-serve ice cream machine with his friend Frank Adams, dialed in his father’s recipe, and pulled the lever. Out came the world’s first frozen margarita. Consistent, cold, and exactly right every time. The machine ran for 34 years before Martinez retired it and donated it to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where it was named one of the top ten inventions in the museum’s collection. A sister version sits today at the Old Red Museum near Dealey Plaza, six miles from where the whole thing started.
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