The Making of America*

By Mark Lambrecht

Scott Fitzgerald once wrote, “And so with the sunshine … I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with hot dog season,” or something like that. Hot Dog Season brings bird songs to the north, children’s laughter to backyards and city streets, and innovative new growth to the landscape. But alas, nothing lasts forever. The learned appreciate that this season, which only lasts for a curtain call from Memorial Day to Labor Day, should be cherished before it ends. Aristotle knew this, when he said, “For one swallow of the hot dog does not make a summer, nor does one day,” or something like that.

With the end of Hot Dog Season quickly approaching, now is a good time to reflect on the innovative new growth that made this season what it is today. The popularity of hot dogs can be traced to Charles Feltman – a German baker who began selling dachshund sausages (as they were once called) in a sliced bun from his rolling Coney Island pushcart in 1867. Their popularity was immediate and it is no coincidence that Canada became a country, Nebraska became a state, and the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia in the same year. 

Things, however, really took off in 1871 when Mr. Feltman opened a permanent kennel complex on Coney Island to sell these barking biscuits. It is said the American people were so enamored with these doghouses that they could not think of much else, thus contributing to the Great Chicago and Peshtigo Fires in the same year, though I am not sure who said that.

Taking the world by firestorm (too soon?), hot dogs spurred innovation. In 1926, Chicagoan inventor Erwin Freund moved hot dog manufacturing into the 20^th century. Prior to 1926, hot dogs and other tasty sausages were encased in animal gut prior to cooking/smoking. But as you can imagine, breeding animals to have tiny little tubular stomachs was time consuming. Erwin Freund, however, solved this problem when he invented the cellulose casing in 1926. Sure, there were those that were dogmatic in their belief that animal gut casings were the best way to make dachshund sausages, but Erwin’s cellulose casings were cheaper and could be manufactured quickly, uniformly, and to precise specifications. The industry took notice of these “skinless” hot dogs, making Erwin quite the industrialist. It is no wonder his estate eventually became part of Argonne National Laboratory.

While the cellulose casing streamlined some of the industrial wiener process, there were still bottlenecks to overcome. Cellulose casings are generally considered inedible – they are simply used to contain the extruded meat goo during the smoking/cooking process. After the cook, the casings are sliced off before the wily wienies are packaged. This process, however, was also time consuming. Like a dog with a bone, many set out to quicken this process. Prolific inventor Bernard T. Hensgen was one of these tenacious problem solvers, and came up with this efficient machine that sliced the casing and used compressed air to blow off the casings from the cooked frank. Pinhead would be proud. The march of innovation continued.

Ray Townsend, another prolific inventor, came up with this machine for speedily encasing the yippy link. It was not a tongue-in-cheek endeavor, since putting tongues and cheeks in casings can take forever. Not to be outdone, Oscar Mayer created the wiener tunnel (a.k.a. hot dog highway), which consisted of a plurality of patented components, machines, and processes that enabled an automated process for taking in and thawing raw meat at one end of the tunnel, processing it, encasing it, cooking it, de-casing it, and vacuum packing it to create consumer-ready products output at the other end of the tunnel in less than an hour. It looked like this, but more complicated.

And to provide their packaged pups to the consumer, Oscar Mayer created the most advanced automobile in human history. Bruce Wayne should take notice.

As you can see, hot dogs are responsible for almost all of the innovative advancements in the United States. So as Hot Dog Season comes to another end, remember what Emily Dickinson once said, “To see the hot dog is poetry,” or something like that.

*AI was not used to write this treatise, but it may have helped if it were.

Mark Lambrecht is an Of Counsel patent attorney with Fishman Stewart. His background includes the electrical, electro-mechanical, electro-magnetic, software/hardware, and hot dog arts.