At a Chinese restaurant the other day, my son asked me who invented fortune cookies, and I had the embarrassment of admitting I didn’t know. I DO know they’re an American invention, along with chop suey, chow mein, and General Tso’s Chicken, but couldn’t go any deeper than that.
So I ask you, the humble denizens of Dopeland: Who invented the fortune cookie, and when? What was the inspiration? And has anyone ever won the lottery using the Lucky Numbers on the back?
http://www.chcp.org/Vfortune.html
This should answer your question.
Now that the question’s answered, I thought I’d chime in with:
Vote for Jan Brady! 
The Los Angeles Times had a long article on fortune cookies (“The Sage of Fortune Cookies”, by Terry McDermott) in the Saturday 4 November 2000 issue. They discussed not so much the origin of fortune cookies, but the origin of the fortunes found inside them. Here’s a summary of the article:
The Chinese fortune cookie was invented in the United States sometime in the early part of the 20th century, probably by either a Japanese American gardener in San Francisco or a Chinese American cook in Los Angeles. The cookies were a California regional specialty until Edward Louie (a San Francisco truck driver) invented a machine to partly automate fortune-cookie making in 1948.
The machine now sold most widely throughout the United States was invented by Yong Lee, a Korean-born engineer in Massachusetts. At one point, more than two-thirds of the fortune cookies baked in the United States were made on Yong Lee machines. Today, most large American cities have at least one and sometimes as many as a dozen fortune cookie makers, most of them small, family businesses.
Many cookie makers simply stole fortunes from one another. These were lifted from sources as diverse as the Bible and Poor Richard’s Almanac, and translated into a kind of mock “Confucius say” language.
Lee built a stock of thousands of the traditional fortunes and began selling them very cheaply to the people who bought his machines. But after a while a need for new fortunes was necessary and Steven Yang, a salesman working for Lee, went into the fortune business for himself. Today, his shop in a bad part of San Francisco is by far the nation’s biggest content provider for cookies. He and his wife work seven days a week packing slips of paper with printed fortunes but no one is ever allowed in due to his passion for secrecy.
Steven Yang tried to get new people to write the fortune cookie messages he was selling. For a while he hired Donna Jackson, a speech pathologist, whose inspiration for many messages was a library book on astrology. But Steven Yang had to find someone else after he lost Donna Jackson’s phone number and the owner of a printing shop referred him to a bookkeeper named Russel Rowland, who wrote 700 new messages, which makes him a very widely read author. Nowadays Steven Yang is still looking for people willing to write fortunes for him.