Original subtitles

Nearly 70% of Americans will enjoy a barbecue

on the 4th of July alone.

Barbecue really embeds itself as this kind of

uniquely American phenomenon,

particularly on holidays and during the summer months.

This is a ubiquitous symbol of a summer pastime.

Charcoal sales are an astronomical

$747 million in the United States alone,

and more than $600 million worth of hotdogs

are sold between Memorial Day and Labor Day.

We gather and cook outdoors,

even if the great outdoors is our backyard.

The American barbecue grill market

is worth almost three billion dollars.

But a hundred years ago,

the backyard barbecue as we know it, doesn't exist.

There was no demand in America for this.

People don't know what to do with it.

You wanted to be cooking inside

in your more modern, electric kitchen.

It would take visionaries.

Henry Ford could look into the future

and see this love affair we were going to have

with grilling out and charcoal.

He sees these buoys and he says,

I think I can do something with this.

I call it the Wiener Mobile.

It's one of the most successful

advertising coups in history.

God, I love America.

Each invention.

It starts with good food.

Forging the way for the next.

Then you'd light it all up

with some Kingsford charcoal, on a Weber grill.

It gave America a product that they needed.

To ignite one of America's

greatest food innovations.

George Steven took his brainchild

from a mere idea in his head,

into something in the backyards

of nearly everybody in America.

In the 1920s, the idea that most Americans

would be cooking right outside their homes,

is nothing short of preposterous.

The idea of a backyard comes along with suburbia.

That hadn't really been invented.

If you were living, certainly in a tenement

or in another kind of urban settlement,

you couldn't just go outside and grill.

Back in those days, pre automobile,

you had the urban America and then you had rural America.

They were miles, miles apart, literally and figuratively.

But the American landscape is changing,

thanks in part to one key invention,

Henry Ford's automobile.

The Model T changed both how we drove around

and how we got things in a huge way.

It was cheap and it was reliable.

Suddenly, you're mobile.

The Model T made the car approachable

for most every American family,

and it opened up this world of open roads,

and seeing the world in a way that

they'd only read about before.

But while sales of the Model T skyrocket,

Henry Ford begins to see a major flaw

in his otherwise efficient operation.

Ed.

Yeah.

What more can we be doing with the saw mill waste?

Model Ts used a great deal of hardwood.

They had wooden running boards

and a lot of other parts that were wooden.

I'm Henry Ford and I hate waste.

I'm looking at my sawmill factory

and I'm just looking at piles and piles,

tons of sawdust and wood scraps piling up,

and I can't deal with it.

Carting away the wood waste

is costing Ford $182,000 a day, in today's money.

Well, we could just burn it.

No, I mean,

what can we do with it?

What can we make?

Edward Kingsford was a real estate agent first,

who actually had given Ford the land

upon which to make their wood mill.

And Henry Ford gets Edward Kingsford

to run his sawmill for him.

He knows timber.

He brings Henry something that he didn't have,

a business knowledge of the outdoors.

So he was able to run this wood producing,

parts producing, component for Ford Motor Company.

There's gotta be a use for it.

Henry Ford was a fisherman, he was a hunter,

but really it was the time that he got to think

outside of the office,

it was the time that he got to spend ideating.

Henry Ford invited Edward Kingsford

to come along with him camping.

It's not catching.

The wood's too moist.

Henry Ford was a big naturalist.

He would go on outdoor trips and would love to cook.

So, collect some more.

It's no use, it rained last night.

Henry Ford is always thinking about

how to make the whole more efficient,

to get greater and greater productivity.

He was always about what can I learn

and how can I use that to improve business,

to improve the lives of others?

He was a tinkerer.

Kingsford,

I think we just figured out what we're gonna do

with all that sawdust.

Almost a quarter century earlier, in 1895,

an inventor named WP Taggart,

invented a new kind of fuel

by combining bits of wood and sawdust.

He was patenting charcoal briquets to be used

as a portable fuel source for heating.

Basically, charcoal is a dense wood

that's been burned, so then when you burn it

the second time, it produces a constant high heat.

But people simply didn't see the need

to risk switching from firewood

to the unfamiliar fuel source.

There was no demand in America for this.

And you have this charcoal patent,

people don't know what to do with it.

Ford came up with the idea of burning a wood waste down

and turning it into charcoal briquets.

Ford thinks, well, we're going into the charcoal business.

One day, sales of charcoal will reach

half a billion dollars a year,

and Ford's colleagues name, Kingsford,

will be on the number one charcoal brand

in the United States.

But for now, Ford hopes bringing charcoal out of obscurity,

will solve his wood waste problem.

But before briquets become a household staple,

many more groundbreaking innovations will

need to take hold.

Meanwhile, in Chicago,

a young man has just begun working

at his uncle's meat processing company.

One of his first tasks

is making the rounds of the local butcher shops,

to inspect how his company's products are being displayed.

Which ones are Oscar Mayer's?

At the time, people weren't packaging their hotdogs,

and generally it was sold to the public in a giant bin.

Retailers really didn't position one dog as being better

or even different than any others.

If you don't know,

how should the customers know?

Who are you to tell me how to run my shop, Sir?

Carl Mayer, of the Oscar Mayer company.

One day, Carl will help Oscar Mayer

become the world's biggest name in hotdogs.

And thanks to their innovations,

Americans will enjoy them, coast to coast,

catapulting the hotdog into the fourth most popular food

in the country.

But for now...

Carl Mayer is 27 years old, really brash, loads of ideas,

but sometimes he gets a little too big for his britches,

so to speak.

Oscar Mayer came to the United States in 1873

from a very poor family in Bavaria,

and he decided then to open his own shop,

having learned meat cutting for a number of years.

Oscar F's brother, Gottfried died early,

unfortunately from appendicitis.

His son Carl, went to college to study business

and then worked his way into the business.

Their dedication to quality

in their bacon and sausage, has built the brand

since the late 1800s, in Chicago and the Midwest region.

From the very beginning,

they advertised their products as the best, the purest,

because they signed on right away

to the new meat inspection laws.

But when it comes to hotdogs,

it's an uphill battle to convince consumers they're safe.

People were wary and skeptical about hotdogs

after Upton Sinclair's novel, "The Jungle" came out

and exposed some pretty horrific stuff

about what went into some of these processed meat products.

And even years later,

these questionable fillings have left a stigma.

The rumor was that hotdogs got their name

from dachshund dogs, that German breed of dog

with their long slim bodies,

but also they may or may not have used dog meat

to make them.

Yuck.

But Carl Myers determined

to help change the public's perspective.

So when the federal government starts

a meat inspection service,

the Mayer brothers are among the first to step up and say,

"yes, we want you to inspect our product."

Hotdogs have gained regional popularity

thanks to a few trusted restaurants and hotdog stands,

like Nathan's and Feltman's of Coney Island.

But the idea of home-cooked hotdogs is still mostly obscure.

People thought of hotdogs as really a novelty food item,

something when you were having fun,

you'd have it at the boardwalk or a baseball game.

It wasn't something people considered

as part of the food items they would serve at their table.

To get people to make hotdogs at home,

Oscar Mayer knows he'll first need to gain their trust.

Oscar Mayer had seven full-time government inspectors

stationed at various points in their factory,

inspecting the food.

This level of transparency was unheard of.

Even though the Mayer family goes the extra mile

by labeling their boxes and to get a government stamp

on the boxes, sometimes the boxes are thrown away

and the hotdogs are just thrown in the bin

with every other hotdog, despite the difference in quality.

But Oscar Mayer thinks if they can convince people

that this is something on their menu at home,

at their dinner table,

they're onto something.

Carl Mayer wants to be the one

to make this vision a reality.

And to do so,

he'll have to sell his uncle

on one of the most radical schemes

in food history.

It's the late 1920s,

and automobile mogul, Henry Ford,

believes he's figured out what to do

with the 350 tons of wood waste

coming from his Model T factory each year.

Ford came up with the idea of burning a wood waste down

and turning it into charcoal briquette.

But neither Ford

nor his sawmill manager, Edward Kingsford,

knows the first thing about making charcoal.

So he turns to one of his lifelong mentors for help.

Ford has this incredible

list of close friends.

One of his closest is Thomas Edison.

They were kindred spirits.

They were both tinkerers great American iconic tinkerers.

So he approaches Edison and says,

"help me build a charcoal factory."

Edison readily jumped in.

The factory Edison designs

exceeds anything Ford imagined,

making use of every last scrap of wood and sawdust.

Edison didn't just design any charcoal factory.

It was a model of efficiency.

600 pounds of charcoal from every two tons of waste.

Incredible.

Ford puts Kingsford in charge

of the briquette factory,

which sits on the same tract of land as his sawmill.

Together they become known as Iron Mountain,

but it's still not without risk.

Henry Ford is this, you know, mega successful businessman.

He's already made it.

So getting into the charcoal business is a little off brand.

So if this doesn't work out for him,

this can really damage his reputation.

This can take a little

polish off the Ford name.

A quarter century prior,

there was no interest in charcoal.

Now it's up to Ford to create a demand.

But beyond hunting and fishing trips,

outdoor cooking is still virtually unknown to the public.

Henry Ford, because he had a love of the outdoors,

and he knew it was this coveted luxury

to be able to get to the outdoors,

I think that he had a good sense of Americans wanting

and chasing that dream.

And as Americans become more mobile

and public parks start sprouting up across the country,

they are gathering outdoors more and more, for picnics.

Ford knew that the American consumer,

which included the workers at Ford's factory,

the more they enjoyed their family,

the more cars they were gonna buy.

People suddenly realized that they're able to

go and explore the world, in a greater way.

It gives them a sense that they're able to

live the kind of lives, at least for brief moments,

that previously only rich people have been able to enjoy.

Ford sees an opportunity

to capitalize on charcoal,

and packages his briquets

with a small brazier style grill.

Brazier's had been around for a while.

They're basically a metal box or bowl

that sits off the ground and people would burn wood inside.

First used thousands of years ago,

by the 1900s, modern versions of the brazier

are used primarily by campers

during hunting and fishing trips.

They're very simple little metal grills,

no more than two feet long,

only about 16 inches wide and not that deep.

They really didn't give you much flexibility in cooking.

And the only fuel source

available to grill with is wood,

which usually only burns for less than 45 minutes,

while charcoal can stay lit for up to three hours.

Hoping to guide Americans toward outdoor cooking,

in the mid thirties, Ford begins selling picnic kits

out of his dealerships, for $1.

It's essentially a bag of Ford charcoal and a grill.

And that's forward thinking really in America at the time,

and thus begins one of the craziest side hustles

ever known in American history.

Ford's confident that Americans

will fall in love with outdoor cooking.

Henry Ford was someone who was deeply invested

in celebrating a very particular kind of American ideal.

He had a vision that he wanted to see

come from his head into the real world.

But Ford's vision is about to be derailed

by something he never saw coming.

Meanwhile, Carl Mayer reports to his uncle, Oscar Mayer,

that in butcher shop barrels,

customers can't tell the difference

between their superior quality hotdogs and all the rest.

Oscar and Carl met every day.

They talked all the time.

And they develop an unprecedented strategy.

Oscar Mayer did something really genius

to the packaging, to distinguish the product

as a high quality product.

They came up with the idea, let's put yellow bands on

individual hot dogs.

Somebody had invented a glue

which would hold paper around a sausage.

So it was a glue which held paper together,

which was not poisonous.

Oscar is always in the forefront of technology.

That became a hallmark for them,

that if you wanted people to buy your product,

you'd say, "look for the yellow band,

that's how you know it's ours."

You know what they're doing with that

is not just being creative in advertising,

is they're creating a brand image.

They're doing something that firms struggle so hard to do.

But it's a time consuming

and expensive undertaking.

Those yellow bands had to be wrapped around

each individual hotdog, by hand.

And if it doesn't work,

it's on Carl's shoulders.

Carl felt that this incredible imposition

on their labor force,

which could have been a waste of time,

would actually prove to be the distinctive mark of quality

for an Oscar Mayer wiener.

It's 1935,

Henry Ford's latest business venture, charcoal briquets,

is struggling to get off the ground.

He's got car salesman trying to sell

a Ford picnic kit with charcoal and a portable grill.

But then comes America's Great Depression,

which shuts everything down.

Suddenly a new image

of outdoor cooking is cemented,

but it's a far cry from the idyllic one Ford's pushing.

So when briquets entered the market in the 1930s,

they did so at a time when cooking outside

was not aspirational by any stretch of the imagination.

People who could afford other options

were not going out and buying briquets,

to cook outside the way they assumed only poor people do.

People were cooking outdoors because they were living in,

you know, shanty towns.

Cooking outdoors didn't have the luxury

and that kind of big American dream

that Henry Ford was envisioning.

He's now sitting on tons

of unsold charcoal briquets

and a sprawling factory with little to show for it.

It will take some ingenuity,

but the briquets will one day spawn

a 500 million dollar a year company,

which Henry Ford won't see a dime of.

It's 1934, six years since Carl Mayer helped his uncle

market their wieners by wrapping them in yellow bands.

Oscar Mayer takes out ads,

and their ads actually said,

not only was this a product of extreme quality

that the public should trust,

but they instructed the public to look for the yellow band.

The yellow band,

and the marketing push behind it, pay off,

as sales of Oscar Mayer's hotdogs begin to grow.

Oscar Mayer develops a reputation,

and I think fairly so, of being extremely consistent

in the way they made their products.

This generates what you might call brand loyalty.

By the mid 1930s, the Oscar Mayer Company

expands from the Midwest

to the eastern United States,

but the company's top selling meats

are still bacon and sausage.

Hotdogs in the 1920s and thirties are not food

that you prepare at home.

This is street food that you would buy at a sporting event.

It's not considered an everyday food

you can feed your family.

But Carl sees greater potential in hotdogs

and proposes another plan.

Carl Mayer comes out with an idea that

maybe doesn't make so much sense at first.

I call it

the Wiener Mobile.

The giant drivable hotdog

with their branding on it.

Is this a joke?

We'll be laughed out of Chicago.

Well, it's...

it's a little late.

Yes, you can thank Carl Mayer for the Wiener Mobile.

Carl's already commissioned

the 13 foot long novelty vehicle,

at a cost of $5,000,

over a hundred thousand dollars today.

And even though the Mayer family

mustered up all of their courage

to believe in this project,

they thought he was one bun short of a pack.

In 1936, despite reservations

from many within the company,

the Wiener Mobile hits the streets of Chicago.

Today it seems like nothing special,

but consider that it wasn't until the 1940s

that the military even had its own Jeep.

So this notion of a branded vehicle

rolling around, promoting hotdogs,

was really, really outside the box.

It seems like something akin to a float

in the Macy's Day parade.

Like, here's something on wheels

that's going down the street, that shouldn't be.

Originally driven locally,

in the open cockpit sat, Little Oscar,

a character meant to add a personal

connection to the brand.

Carl had been to the Chicago World's Fair in 1933,

and there he saw something called the Midget Village,

which was little people

who people could go and look at them,

which is pretty revolting,

but it was very popular.

And he came back and said, you know,

maybe if we had a spokesman,

like a Little Oscar, might be good.

Played by Meinhardt Robbie,

who worked in their advertising department

and would later have a legendary role

as the constable in Wizard of Oz,

Little Oscar would greet onlookers

and occasionally give cooking demonstrations.

The Wiener Mobile was what they'd send around

to various places, and it'll be covered by the press.

So to be a little kid standing on the corner

and all of a sudden you see something coming down the road

that's big and colorful, it's a weird shape,

and it's gonna draw your attention.

That was a big part of the marketing scheme

behind the Wiener Mobile.

Sales increased the following year by $200,000,

which is the modern day equivalent of over $4 million.

Throughout the history of the foods that built America,

the great minds have come up with

some pretty novel marketing ideas.

Wrigley was dropping gum out of airplanes,

the Coca-Cola Museum in Atlanta,

in terms of the iconic nature of them,

few can compare to the Oscar Mayer Wiener Mobile.

Decades later, still touring the highways and byways.

You might pull up alongside a giant hotdog.

God, I love America.

It's one of the most successful

advertising coups in history.

But it's another publicity stunt

that will truly cement the hotdog,

courtesy of the United States President.

In 1939, while the threat of war percolates overseas,

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,

invites King George the Sixth and the Queen,

to his Hyde Park, New York home.

So they set up a picnic at Franklin Roosevelt's homestead

away from Washington.

It's where he grew up.

This would be the first time

a reigning monarch set foot on American soil.

The idea of the visit was to reinforce solidarity

between the British people, the British government,

and the American government.

Remember, this is the eve of the war.

The setting is in stark contrast

to a formal White House state dinner.

They sit outside and for the main course,

the President presents a dish he's pretty sure the royals

have never been served.

Hotdogs.

The King ate hotdogs and asked for more.

There's a famous story, we're not sure if it's true,

but it's in a diary.

The Queen asked FDR,

how do you eat a hotdog?

And he said, well, you put one end in your mouth

and you keep shoving, until it's gone.

That's how you eat it.

She ate it with a knife and fork.

But almost every newspaper in America covered this.

But the hotdogs served weren't Oscar Mayer's,

but their competitors,

who happened to be one of the largest meat purveyors

in the United States.

They were Swift hotdogs.

This was a huge moment for hotdogs

because this changes Americans' attitudes

towards outdoor cooking.

We do all the work and they get all the press.

Oscar Mayer wants his name

to be the one that gets hotdogs into homes across America.

To make that happen, he'll need to innovate

in a bigger way than ever before.

In the early forties,

Carl Mayer is determined to use

Oscar Mayer's reputation for quality hotdogs,

as a weapon against their biggest rival,

the largest meat packers in the country.

Swift was a monster company,

being the largest purveyor nationally,

and they used big distributors to sell their products.

But modern technology

and change in the way Americans shop,

could give Oscar Mayer an edge.

In the mid forties, we get the rise of grocery stores.

The visual appeal of foods became much more important

in terms of marketing.

People wanted to know that what they were getting

was high quality and sanitary.

They wanted to see what was inside all of these packages

they were buying.

Meats such as ground beef and bacon,

in new clear plastic packaging,

become available in supermarket grab and go bins,

and refrigerators are becoming more popular in the home.

The refrigerator allows you to take something

which is in a package and it's gonna keep for a few days.

Oscar Mayer realizes that the presence

of the home refrigerator, changes the rules of the game.

Oscar decided that packaged meats were the way to go,

and they first began doing this with bacon in the 1920s.

As the first to package

pre-sliced bacon and baloney,

Mayer has been ahead of the curve in pioneering packaging.

Now he wants to do the same for hotdogs.

So packaging hotdogs is actually really hard.

You can't really put them in that flat plastic

because air would get in between the plastic bubbles,

and they would spoil really quickly.

In 1944, Oscar Mayer

pours hundreds of thousands of dollars

into cracking the code on how to properly package hotdogs.

They draw inspiration from wartime equipment.

The company came up with a machine

which would make the hotdog packages look like cartridges.

It looked like machine gun cartridges.

Beef hotdogs were put together in strings of 10.

Named for the way machine gun cartridges

are built together,

they call it the cartridge pack.

It absolutely transformed supermarket hotdogs.

And with those, you can put them on refrigerated trucks

and send them out by the new road system.

So after the war, Oscar began buying up

small distribution centers around the country.

Oscar Mayer hotdogs are now sold

in freshly sealed grab and go packages, across the nation.

But there's still one major problem.

Back then, most people did not have a good way

to cook them.

The preferred Nathan style, Coney Island style,

is grilling and you put that hotdog in the bun,

load it up, and it's absolutely perfect.

Since most Americans

don't yet cook outdoors,

they can't recreate the grilled flavor

of restaurant hotdogs.

In 1947, the Ford Motor Company

is mourning the death of their founder, Henry Ford,

and trying to navigate

the future of the company, without him.

World War II ends

and the demand for Ford Motor Company cars

is more than Ford Motor Company can even manage.

Then Henry Ford dies.

And here's the company trying to keep up with the demand

for the American public, for its cars.

And at this point, they make a very rational

business decision to say, we are gonna focus on our cars.

Ford Motor Company sells Ford Charcoal Briquets

to a group of Michigan business leaders,

and these business leaders rename it Kingsford Charcoal,

after Edward Kingsford.

Though neither Kingsford nor Ford

lived to see Ford's vision come to life,

their briquets paved the way for another innovator

to create the key missing piece

of the backyard barbecue puzzle.

He was at the metal works, looking at maritime buoys

they were building and he kind of glimpsed the future.

It's the middle of the 20th century

and Americans are experiencing a post-war economic boom.

What you had was you had all these soldiers

come back from World War II.

By 1950, people were starting families

and people were buying homes in new suburbs.

It's like all part of this package of this kind of

happy domestic life, which is shaped

by that moment in history.

So now people wanted to embrace this outdoor space,

this little green piece of heaven that they never had.

A lot of men during World War II

had learned to cook outside

as part of their military service.

There were these pocket stoves that American soldiers had,

that they used when they were deployed,

in order to cook in very extreme temperatures.

And that was not, I would say,

a fun kind of relaxing experience,

but it certainly was a socializing one.

So as GIs start coming home from World War II,

they also have these skills to cook outside.

But grill options are limited.

Until the 20th century, barbecue meant a big event.

It was a food that was cooked at a political gathering

or a town celebration,

and it was almost always cooked in a pit

that was dug in the ground,

a trench with maybe with masonry sides on it.

And then you started to have recreational cooking.

In the fifties, backyard grills were a static structure,

usually made of brick.

They were hard to clean,

you couldn't really take the grill off to wash it

or clean it, remove the charcoal debris,

and during winter months, it took up real estate

in your yard.

You couldn't wheel it away,

you couldn't move it out of the rain.

Plus many Americans don't have the means

to have the permanent grill structure built.

The only affordable or portable option

is the primitive brazier grill.

They would burn too intensely

and would shoot hot splinters of wood into the food.

They are so dangerous.

In Chicago, a father of 12

is growing frustrated, trying to grill for his family.

George Steven began as a hardworking blue collar guy.

He was a welder.

He's begun cooking

with an alternate fuel source,

that's now gaining in popularity,

charcoal.

But it doesn't solve the other big issue

the brazier poses.

Without a lid, the grill is open to the elements.

Maybe it starts raining, maybe it's windy,

and all of these things really annoyed George.

He wanted a better grill.

He loved steak and he wanted to find a better way

to cook steak.

Stevens is employed by Weber Metal Works,

a shop that produces buoys.

He was at the metal works looking at maritime buoys

they were building, and he kind of glimpsed the future.

He sees these buoys and he says,

"I think I can do something with this."

The thing about George Steven is,

even though he's doing this very respectable

hard day's work, for an honest day's pay kind of jobs,

he's a dreamer.

He thought if I cut this into two pieces

and one side is used for a fire box,

and the other side is used as a lid to control smoke,

this would work out a lot better.

George believes a deeper, rounder shape,

will better concentrate not just the charcoal's heat,

but the unique smokey flavor.

He just kept tinkering with it.

He had in mind from the beginning

to build something new.

Most grills at that point were rectangular.

Anyone that's a dreamer,

anyone that dares to break new ground,

try something that's never been tried before,

usually will meet with a lot of doubt, a lot of derision,

a lot of naysayers,

and a million different reasons to say no.

He's working around the clock

on his new charcoal grill prototype.

George's barbecue had some shortcomings,

which he discovered as he used it.

It had a round bottom but the top of it,

had a flat lid that was almost like the lid of a skillet.

The lid is a key element,

but it creates a major issue.

By putting a lid on it,

it basically meant that you could choke off the fire.

George's invention is looking like a failure.

Like so many dreamers and so many visionaries

before and since, people always laughed at him.

His neighbors laughed and called it Sputnik.

But George will get the last laugh

when his grills one day bring in 2.5 billion dollars a year,

and he's dubbed the father of modern barbecue.

But for now, George can't get his grill to stay lit.

It's 1951 and George Steven

has been working tirelessly

to solve a major problem with his charcoal grill prototype.

The charcoal, it wouldn't stay lit.

By putting a lid on it,

it basically meant that you could choke off the fire.

After hours of frustration,

a quick tip from a neighbor changes everything.

George, give it some air.

Every good fire pit, every good smoker,

and every good grill,

needs to have good air flow,

so there's constant supply of oxygen going to that fire.

The air holes were crucial to keep the flame going.

But George's satisfaction is short-lived

as he soon discovers another problem.

He got really frustrated

because there was no way to control the heat.

It was just burning everything up.

At the metal works, he was making changes to the product.

At home, he was testing it and using it,

and saying what would make it better?

Steven knows he must perfect a way

to control the temperature.

Having louvers meant that you control the airflow,

you control the intensity of the fire.

He added two sets of louvers.

They are the top louvers above the fire,

and then there are the ones underneath.

When you're cooking,

you have to control both of those louvers.

If you get it properly controlled,

you can just get wonderful smoke flavor.

imbued in it.

In 1952 with his prototype complete,

George is eager to have

the metal works company produce them.

But there's still the question

of whether the American consumers will bite.

George's barbecue kettle marketed for $29 and 95 cents.

Sounds like nothing now, but with inflation,

it's the equivalent of something like $275 or $300.

So it was a high-end product from the beginning.

This was not a cheap grill.

So the company runs a limited trial.

He only issues 50 of them,

and it was a real gamble to wonder if, men especially,

were gonna spend this much money on a domestic item.

America was in a time of peace, prosperity,

and there was a desire for status symbols.

And the Weber will A, definitely be a status symbol,

B, give you incredibly good results, time and time again.

They sell out almost immediately,

prompting George's employer Weber Metal Works,

to create a barbecue division, run by George.

I mean it's a well made, well welded,

solid piece of steel that's durable.

They're easy to clean, easy to move,

and you can put it in the garage when you're not using it.

By 1958, Steven's grill is doing so well,

that he buys out the remaining shares of Weber.

But even he isn't sure it will last.

When he turned it into a barbecue company,

he made the name Weber Steven.

He did not make it just Steven

because he was afraid the barbecue thing

might not catch on, and they were gonna have to go back

to making hinges and buoys.

He was hedging his bets.

And it pays off.

George's entrepreneurial endeavors

spark a new national hobby.

George Stevens embodies the American dream.

He's a metal worker, he's a welder,

and he gave America a product that they needed.

It's starting to become national

as growing numbers of barbecue cookbooks

start coming out in the fifties.

Cooking out in America exploded

and is this new found passion.

George Steven took his brainchild

from a mere idea in his head,

into something in the backyards of nearly

everybody in America.

Today, the Weber grill remains a leader

in the barbecue industry,

worth over 2.3 billion dollars,

with 30 million units in American homes.

They're also now top of the game in gas and electric grills.

And their original charcoal kettle

remains a best selling icon.

It was a great piece of industrial design.

It's to barbecue what a pink Cadillac is to cars

in the fifties.

And it becomes an heirloom,

something that can legitimately be passed down

from generation to generation.

I don't have a Weber grill,

I have two of them.

It took almost four decades,

but Ford's vision of outdoor cooking is a reality.

And Kingsford Charcoal becomes the top selling brand

in America, with sales of $500 million annually.

So you look at what Stevens did by creating Weber grill,

well, he now created a need for charcoal.

You got hotdogs now that are a great item

to throw on the grill, right?

This is a guy who's a metal worker and a welder.

He helped all these spinoff industries

where people were able to generate tremendous wealth.

And at the heart of this,

is the home hotdog industry,

since Americans can finally replicate the grilled taste

of restaurant hotdogs.

1950s, demand for hotdogs is soaring,

and it became very popular at home.

Americans are carnivores, so they want meat,

especially hotdogs.

If it's crunchy on the outside

and soft on the inside, it's perfect.

Hotdogs are an essential part of the American cookout.

With demand soaring,

Oscar Mayer revolutionizes

the hotdog industry process again.

They invent the wiener tunnel,

which allows for mass production.

Oscar Mayer has this big huge machine

that internalizes all the functions of hotdog making,

and the only people there, there's people there

at the front of the machine, who are guiding the meat.

Production goes from a thousand an hour

to 36,000 sausages an hour.

In 1963, they debut a new ad campaign.

♪ Oh, I'd love to be an Oscar Mayer wiener ♪

It becomes one of the most iconic jingles

in American history.

By 1968, Oscar Mayer sales reach a record $481 million.

What Oscar Mayer was very good at,

was not just being creative in advertising,

but creating a brand image.

Today, Oscar Mayer sells

92 million hotdogs each year.

And after a four decade hiatus,

the Wiener Mobile returned in 1988

and still roams America today.

For thousands of years,

cooking out referred to the primitive notion

of hanging wild catch over some form of flame pit.

But in a span of only the last hundred years,

the ritual was refined, perfected, and delivered

into the backyard.

As Americans in the 21st century,

we are very blessed to live in a country

that for most of us is a country of abundance,

and we gather, and cook outdoors.

We gather those nearest and dearest to us.

It's a sense of community,

a sense of the enjoyment of good food and drink,

and a sense of celebration.

You light up the grill.

I mean, there's just something about

the flavor of that food,

being in the outdoors together,

that you just can't get any other way.

When you think about the backyard barbecue,

the smell of whatever's cooking on the grill

and the charcoal burning in your backyard,

it's baseball, apple pie, and grilling out.

It is America.