page_title: History of the hamburger
section_title: McDonald's era
hierarchical_section_title: History of the hamburger / Commercialization / McDonald's era
caption_attribution_description: Painting of McDonald's meals. Work by Dutch artist Peter Klashorst.
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: In 1937, Patrick McDonald and his two sons Richard and Maurice inaugurated the simple restaurant "Airdrome" on Huntington Drive (Route 66) near the airport in the American city of Monrovia, California. The success of its sales eventually led to the May 15, 1940, opening of a restaurant named McDonald's along U.S. Route 66 in San Bernardino, California. After analyzing their sales, the brothers discovered that, to their surprise, 80% of their revenue was coming from selling hamburgers. The menu initially featured 25 different dishes, the majority of which were barbecued. Through their new restaurant, the McDonald brothers introduced the notion of fast food to parts of the Western United States by 1948. From the beginning, McDonald's focused on making hot dogs and hamburgers as efficiently and quickly as possible. During the 1940s, simple and formative concepts took root at McDonald's, including the preparation and service of burgers in just one minute and the ability for customers to eat in their own cars in a drive-in style. All the while, the restaurant was trying to further develop a hamburger that was inexpensive enough to be within the economic reach of most Americans. By the 1950s, the concept of drive-in style service had become firmly established and hamburgers and cars had become closely connected in the minds of many Americans. It was now not only possible for a customer to purchase a hamburger without getting out of a car, and a customer also no longer needed to wait to be served. The McDonald brothers built upon the achievements of their original San Bernardino restaurant when in 1953 they began franchising their now famous chain restaurants, starting in Phoenix, Arizona, and Downey, California (the latter of which is still in operation). Later, Ray Kroc opened one in the northwest Chicago suburb of Des Plaines, Illinois on April 15, 1955, which has now been converted into the McDonald's Museum. It is noteworthy that the original McDonald's mascot was a hamburger faced cook called "Speedee" that would serve as the iconographic identity of the company until being replaced by the clown Ronald McDonald in 1963.
  The McDonald brothers intensively studied the existing kitchen protocol of their restaurants in an effort to improve them. They looked at different options that could increase the speed of cooking hamburgers, designing and patenting special grills that had a higher output, made their cutlery and other kitchen utensils disposable, and introduced dishwashers that reduced the costs of water, soap, and labor. The brothers also created a detailed system for operating each kitchen throughout the franchise in a similar and largely standardized manner, as well as recruiting adolescents as employees in the kitchens.
  The company began to expand at a much faster rate when 52-year-old ice cream machinery salesman Ray Kroc took over as its chief executive. Kroc was the initiator of both McDonald's expansion across the United States and the definitive standardization of its burgers. He was not alone, however, as some of his co-workers were also very productive and innovative. McDonald's executive and food scientist Herb Peterson invented the McMuffin in 1972 and also the now famous greeting, "May I have your order, please?". In another key development, Jim Delligatti of the Pittsburgh franchise invented the Big Mac in 1967. The McDonald's successful expansion was mainly due to its use of the franchise system, an innovation borrowed from a sewing machine manufacturer, the Singer Corporation. Singer had developed it during the late 19th century, and it was so successful that it was soon adopted by its competitors. Nowadays, McDonald's even has its own university for training its staff: Hamburger University, located in Oak Brook, Illinois. Graduates receive a degree entitled "bachelor of hamburgerology with a minor in French fries". As McDonald's expanded into other countries, it encountered more opposition and general difficulties, as was the case in 1996 when it opened a restaurant in New Delhi amid outcry from Indian le
caption: In the 1960s, McDonald's advertised the ability of a customer to eat the same burger anywhere in the United States, and a few decades later it made the same feat possible in much of the world.
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