by Tom Stewart

Created on: June 11, 2009

Ever since the invention of the wheel, people have needed places to stop and eat while traveling the countryside. Inns and taverns were the only options for hundreds of years going as far back as ancient Greece and Roman times. As man developed more sophisticated forms of travel, quicker and more convenient forms of dining were needed. These types of restaurants are known today as fast food restaurants. But who was the first to open a fast food restaurant?

Well some people consider White Castle to be the first restaurant to offer fast food. Originally opened in Kansas in 1921, White Castle restaurants revolutionized the hamburger by letting diners watch how the meal was prepared. Most people thought hamburger meat was just left over scraps from a slaughterhouse. But White Castle changed these perceptions and made the hamburger a respectable, affordable, and quick meal for Americans across the country.

But the most famous fast food restaurant and still the most successful is the one with the 'Golden Arches'. McDonald's was the first to create a hamburger restaurant that used an assembly line type of system to mass produce hamburgers for its customers. Originally Dick and Mac McDonald ran a hot dog stand at an airport in California but eventually graduated to owning a full restaurant on Route 66 in 1940. The menu consisted of 25 items, mostly barbecue, but their hamburgers quickly became the most profitable items. So in 1948, McDonalds's revamped their system and started mass producing hamburgers for their customers. The new menu was just hamburgers, French fries, and milk shakes, and it was the birth of fast food in America. In 1953, McDonald's became a franchise when the second restaurant opened in Phoenix, Arizona, then a third in Michigan, a fourth in Downey, California, and so on. By 1959 there were already 100 McDonald's restaurants operating in the United States. It was around this same time that other fast food restaurants started popping up and giving McDonald's competition.

In 1954, inspired by a visit to one of the original McDonald's restaurants in California, James McLamore and David Edgerton opened InstaBurger King in Miami, Florida. Later changing its name to Burger King, it became one of McDonald's chief competitors. By 1967 Burger King had grown to 274 restaurants nation-wide with a different concept of grilling their hamburgers, not frying.

In 1962 another famous fast food restaurant opened its doors to compete with McDonald's

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