Hotly Contested
“Great minds think alike” isn’t just an adage; it’s a literal fact. No less than five men came up with what’s now known as the hot dog.
The man who gets the official credit is Charles Feltman, yet another German immigrant. While there’s a story about how Feltman sold frankfurters from a modified pie wagon, historian Bruce Kraig says that’s likely untrue.
Though Feltman was a baker, he was also a restaurateur with a well-documented hatred of pushcart vendors. The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Food and Drink does say Feltman began selling his “red hots” on Coney Island in the early 1870s.
While public records show many men sold hot dogs in the late 19th Century, the men who popularized the hot dog were all at the Columbian Exposition in 1893. Two of them, Austro-Hungarian émigrés Emil Reichel and his brother-in-law Samuel Ladany, had secured a concession stand in the “Old Vienna” section of the Chicago fair, conveniently located by one of the Midway Plaisance entrances.
The hot dog bun seems to be a later invention, as Reichel and Ladany purportedly served their “Vienna sausage” in a French roll topped with mustard and onions. Their mixture of beef and spices was considerably milder in flavor compared to the sausages Feltman sold at the time. Though there are no sales receipts, the fair itself had over 27 million attendees.
Reichel and Ladany’s success at the World’s Fair encouraged them to found the Vienna Sausage Manufacturing Company that same year, which was ultimately renamed Vienna Beef in 1929. If you’ve ever passed a hot dog cart in Chicago, you’ve likely seen the company’s garish logo.
The 1893 fair also propelled another family business with a familiar name. Oscar Mayer and his brother Gottfried supplied many of the fair’s sausage vendors and were an official sponsor of the German display. While the two Germans started their company as a North Side butcher shop, they too moved into manufacturing after the fair.
Given all the Germans and Austrians mentioned above, it certainly makes sense the names commonly associated with hot dogs — frankfurter and wiener — are derived from two cities known for their prized sausages, Frankfurt and Vienna (Wien). And for what it’s worth, no one at the 1893 fair called hot dogs “hot dogs.”
For many years, it was widely believed that sportswriter and New York Evening Journal cartoonist Tad Dorgan coined the term hot dog. He was supposedly at a New York Giants baseball game when he heard a vendor pushing his “red-hot dachshunds.” It’s said Dorgan doodled a wiener dog in a bun, which he labeled a “hot dog” due to his inability to spell dachshund.
It’s a nice story, but there are two problems with it. One, Dorgan wasn’t living in New York when he was supposedly at the game. And two, there’s no record of the cartoon’s existence despite the widespread availability of Dorgan’s work.
The name is more likely the result of snarky college kids. Students at Yale University had taken to calling lunch wagons “dog wagons” because they believed that their frankfurters were made with dog meat.
Entomologists Dr. Gerald Cohen, Barry Popik, and David Shulman wrote a monograph about this, sharing that they found a reference to “hog dogs” in an 1895 issue of The Yale Record. The term quickly spread to other colleges in the northeast, including Harvard, Cornell, and Princeton.
One wiener purveyor, Billy Adams, was clearly in on the joke as he named his vending business the Yale Kennel Club. His wagon was adorned with paintings of various dog breeds, but primarily hounds and dachshunds. The Kennel Club was also decorated with stained glass art featuring even more dogs.
Yale students apparently referred to the stained glass as “memorial panels.” Should you ever doubt the value of an Ivy League education, let this anecdote change your mind.