The world’s favorite cookie, with an annual global revenue of $1.5 billion, is celebrating its 100th birthday. The Oreo cookie was born in 1912, the same year the South Pole was discovered and the Titanic sank.

Kraft Foods is the proud custodian of Oreo, but it hasn’t always been so. The cookie began with the National Biscuit Company (Nabisco, which in 1971, became the official corporate name).

It was in 1898 that several baking companies merged to form Nabisco. By 1902 the company created Barnum’s Animal cookies and made them famous by selling them in a cage-like box with a string attached (to hang on Christmas trees).

The next great creation given to the cookie-loving public was the Oreo, two chocolate disks with a cream filling in between. The first Oreo cookie, with an embossed thin wreath on the outer edge and the Oreo name on the plain surface in the middle, looked very similar to the Oreo cookie of today; its look didn’t change much until 1975 whe...