page_title: History of the hamburger
section_title: Culinary history
hierarchical_section_title: History of the hamburger / Culinary history
caption_attribution_description: English: Popeye the Sailor Meets Ali Baba's Forty Thieves (1937). The film has fallen into the public domain, as its copyright has expired.
context_page_description: The hamburger first appeared in the 19th or early 20th century. The modern hamburger was a product of the culinary needs of a society rapidly changing due to industrialization and the emergence of the working class and middle class with the resulting demand for mass-produced, affordable food that could be consumed outside of the home.
  Considerable evidence suggests the USA was the first country where two slices of bread and a ground beef steak were combined into a "hamburger sandwich" and sold. There is some controversy over the origin of the hamburger because its two basic ingredients, bread and beef, had been prepared and consumed separately for many years in different countries before their combination. Shortly after its creation, the hamburger quickly included all of its currently typically characteristic trimmings, including onions, lettuce, and sliced pickles. It is named after the German city of Hamburg.
  After various controversies in the 20th century, including a nutritional controversy in the late 1990s, the burger is now readily identified with the United States, and a particular style of cuisine, namely fast food.
context_section_description: The hamburger was very popular among Americans during the postwar period following World War I, even in popular culture. An example of this was the prominent appearance of hamburgers in E. C. Segar's Thimble Theatre comic strip, which prominently featured a cartoon character named Popeye the Sailor who ate spinach to sustain his superhuman strength. Popeye's first appearance was as a supporting character on January 17, 1929, alongside many other characters. One of these characters was J. Wellington Wimpy (often shortened to just "Wimpy"), a lover of hamburgers who was both polite and gluttonous. His signature phrase, "I will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today", became popular and widely known. During the height of his popularity in the 1930s, Wimpy introduced the hamburger to the youth of the time as a healthy food. It also resulted in the creation of a chain of fast food restaurants called Wimpy's in his honor, which sold hamburgers for ten cents. In a similar fashion, the fictional character Jughead Jones, who first appeared in Archie Comics in 1941, was passionate about food generally, and hamburgers specifically.
  Fictional characters related to the hamburger, such as the Ronald McDonald clown character designed by Willard Scott who first appeared on television in 1963, soon became a recognizable part of American culture. The burger also made appearances in underground comix such as Zap Comix#2 during the late 1960s, in which cartoonist Robert Crumb designed a character called "Hamburger Hi-Jinx". By the end of the decade, pop art was including the hamburger as an artistic element, appearing in the works of Andy Warhol (Dual Hamburger), Claes Oldenburg (Floor Burger), Mel Ramos (Vinaburger, 1965), and more recently, David LaChapelle (Death by Hamburger, 2002).
  An example of the popularity and identification that the burger enjoyed among the American public was the name of the Battle of Hamburger Hill, which occurred in May 1969 during the Vietnam War. Its name was inspired by the number of American and Vietnamese casualties, which made the scene resembles a "butcher". The hamburger was also the inspiration of Star Wars creator George Lucas's design for the Millennium Falcon ship. Hamburgers also appear in computer games, as in the case of BurgerTime, an arcade-style game created in 1982 by Data East Corporation. The hamburger also appears prominently on American television shows such as American Eats and Man v. Food.
  By the 1960s, American society had become highly motorized, largely due to the 1956 Federal Highway Act passed by President Dwight Eisenhower and inspired by the German Autobahn, as well as the impressive growth rates of American automobile manufacturers at the time. Due to the extensive use of cars at the time, hamburgers were often served at drive-ins, often by waiters known as carhops. Drive-in restaurants first appeared in the United States in the early 1930s, and gradually become a common sight across the country. The ability to serve hamburgers to customers in their cars was seen as a business opportunity by countless fast-food chains, especially McDonald's. The popularity of the hamburger grew rapidly among the American population during this period, and statistics indicate that the average American was eating three burgers per week.
  During the Cold War, the hamburger became a national symbol of the United States. As private outdoor social events, often held in backyards and featuring a barbecue, became more widespread during the mid-1950s, the hamburger gained a new culinary and social relevance in the country. By the late 1960s, hamburgers began to grow in size as various burger chains competed with each other, resulting in Burger King launching the Whopper and McDonald's launching the Quarter Pounder. As the race between the major chains grew more intense, the prices of their burgers increased, and the days when a hamburger could be bought for just a few cents were numbered.
  In the 1970s, major hamburger chains began to use considerable resources in marketing their products. They began
caption: J. Wellington Wimpy (Wimpy), on the left one of Popeye's friends from a 1937 cartoon, had a tremendous craving for hamburgers.
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