Barbecue Grill - History in The USA

History in The USA

Grilling existed in the Americas since pre-colonial times. The Arawak people used a wooden structure to roast meat on, which was called barbacoa in Spanish. For some time, the word referred to the wooden structure and not the act of grilling, but this word was eventually applied to the pit style cooking techniques used in the Southeastern United States. Originally used to slow cook hogs, different ways of preparing the food lead to regional variations. In time, other food were cooked in a similar fashion, with hamburgers and hot dogs being recent additions.

E.G. Kingsford is the inventor of the modern charcoal briquette. Kingsford was a relative of Henry Ford who saw that Ford's Model T production lines were producing a large amount of wood scraps that were just being discarded. Kingsford suggested to Ford that a charcoal manufacturing facility be established next to the assembly line and sell the charcoal, with the Ford name, in Ford dealerships. After Kingsford's death, the company was renamed Kingsford Charcoal Co. in his honor.

George Stephen created the hemispherical grill design, jokingly called "Sputnik" by Stephen's neighbors. Stephen, a welder, worked for Weber Brothers Metal Works, a metal fabrication shop primarily concerned with welding steel spheres together to make buoys. Stephen was tired of wind blowing ash onto his food when he grilled so he took the lower half of a buoy, welded three steel legs onto it, and fabricated a shallower hemisphere for use as a lid. He took the results home and following some initial success started the Weber-Stephen Products Co.

The outdoor gas grill was invented in the 1960s in Little Rock, Arkansas by William G. Wepfer and Melton Lancaster while working for ARKLA, the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Company. Wepfer, a graduate of the U.S.Naval Academy, was Director of Marketing, charged with finding new ways to sell natural gas to ARKLA residential customers, and therefore bought a basic charcoal grill and re-designed it in the Wepfer's garage so that natural gas provided the fuel for the grill. (Cleanup)