History
The original round kettle grill was built by George Stephen Sr., a part-owner of a sheet metal shop in Chicago who sought to improve on the brazier he had been using to cook with at home. The grill was produced using two sheet metal half-spheres normally used as parts of buoys built in his shop. George's neighbors called it ‘Sputnik‘. Shortly thereafter he began selling the invention, which he called 'George's Barbecue Kettle', for which there was considerable demand.
Because the grill became so successful after he began selling it in 1952, Stephen formed the barbecue division of the Weber Brothers factory. In the late 1950s, Stephen bought out the Weber Brothers factory and became the sole owner, devoting all his professional time to manufacturing and selling the Weber kettle. Soon thereafter, Stephen changed the company’s name to Weber-Stephen Products Co.
In 1989, the company opened the first Weber Grill Restaurant in Wheeling, Illinois. Later, three more locations were built in Lombard, Illinois (1999), downtown Chicago (2002), and Schaumburg, Illinois (2005). Another Weber Grill Restaurant opened in Indianapolis in July 2007. Webers are traditional 30th birthday presents in certain parts of the world.
Read more about this topic: Weber-Stephen Products LLC
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“So in accepting the leading of the sentiments, it is not what we believe concerning the immortality of the soul, or the like, but the universal impulse to believe, that is the material circumstance, and is the principal fact in this history of the globe.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“... that there is no other way,
That the history of creation proceeds according to
Stringent laws, and that things
Do get done in this way, but never the things
We set out to accomplish and wanted so desperately
To see come into being.”
—John Ashbery (b. 1927)