In 1935 Denver’s Humpty-Dumpty’s, Made An Unsuccessful Attempt To Trademark The Word “Cheeseburger”

There are many theories to the beginning of the cheeseburger dating back to the 1920s.

• 1914 – During the First World War the U.S. Government tried to rename burgers as “Liberty Sandwiches” to promote patriotism and avoid using its original Germanic name.
• 1921 – An American food icon, White Castle, opens its doors for the first time in Wichita, Kansas.
• 1926 – Lionel Sternberger is reputed to have invented the cheeseburger in 1926 while working at his father’s Pasadena, California sandwich shop, The Rite Spot. During an experiment, he dropped a slice of American cheese on a sizzling hamburger.
• 1928 – A cheeseburger appeared on a 1928 menu at O’Dell’s, a Los Angeles restaurant, which listed a cheeseburger, smothered with chili, for 25 cents.
• 1930s – According to its archives, Gus Belt, founder of Steak n’ Shake, applied for a trademark on the word “cheeseburger” in the 1930s.
• 1934 – Kaelin’s Restaurant – Louisville, Kentucky says it invented the cheeseburger in 1934.
• 1935 – Humpty-Dumpty’s, a Denver, Colorado drive-through, makes an unsuccessful attempt to trademark the word “cheeseburger.”
• 1939 – According to the Oxford English Dictionary, hamburger was first abbreviated to burger in 1939.
• 1977 – McDonald’s pays $1 million in damages to TV producers Sid and Marty Kroft, who claimed the McDonald’s “Mayor McCheese” was a direct ripoff of their own H.R. Pufnstuff character.
• 2012 – The biggest cheeseburger ever was cooked by a Minnesota casino in 2012 and weighed 2,014 pounds. It required a special oven, a crane, and a special bun that had to be baked for seven hours.
• Approximately 40 percent of hamburgers served in the United States contain cheese on them. A survey conducted at Red Robin stated that over 70 percent of their customers would like cheese added to the patty itself.

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  Each year, Americans eat a whopping 50 billion burgers, or three burgers a week. That’s a lot of beef!

• Hamburgers and cheeseburgers account for 71 percent of beef served in commercial hotels in the United States.
• McDonalds sells 75 hamburgers a second.
• If all Hamburgers eaten by Americans in a year were arranged in a straight line, it would circle our Earth 32 times or more!
• The Hamburger Hall of Fame is located in Seymour, Wisconsin. It celebrates hamburger history.
• Cheeseburger songs:
  • Cheeseburger in Paradise by Jimmy Buffett (1978). Any self-respecting lover of cheeseburgers will be perfectly familiar with Jimmy Buffett’s tribute to the cheeseburger.
  • His Cheeseburger by Veggie Tales (2011). Sure, it’s a kid’s song. But it’s also a rock love ballad describing the deep emotions of a gourd named Mr. Lunt who is in love with cheeseburgers.
  • The Cheeseburger Song by Lucinnio (2020). A singer-songwriter from Romania who mostly writes about food, Lucinnio also sings songs such as The Muffin Song, The Pancake Song and The Chicken Nuggets Song. He does seem to love to have “everything on it”.
  • The Cheeseburger Family by Jack Stauber’s Micropop (2018). This avant-pop folk indie lo-fi band first released only a 30-second clip of this song but then, due to high demand, put out the entire 4 minute version that can now be found on YouTube, complete with a picture of a clay hamburger face.

Sources: 

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