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White Castle was built by two men born in 1880: Walter A. Anderson, a short-order cook who by 1916 was testing burgers in converted streetcar diners in Wichita, Kansas, and Edgar Waldo “Billy” Ingram, a real estate and insurance salesman. Starting in 1921 with a $700 investment, they faced a public still frightened of ground beef after Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel The Jungle described rats and poisoned bait in Chicago meatpacking. Their answer was visible hygiene: small white enamel brick buildings modeled on the Chicago Water Tower, stainless steel and porcelain interiors, open grills, and cooks in spotless white uniforms. Anderson’s five-hole patty sat on a bed of sliced onions under the bottom bun, so steam rising through the holes cooked the top and warmed the bread, and the burger never had to be flipped.

Ingram built the machine around it. With no national food distributors, the company ran its own bakeries and meat plants, and Ingram invented a machine to fold disposable paper hats, spinning off a subsidiary in 1932 that made 42 million hats by 1955. Anderson sold his half to Ingram in 1933. In 1934 Ingram moved headquarters to Columbus, Ohio, later closed the original Wichita and Omaha markets as the least profitable, and launched Porcelain Steel Buildings to make prefabricated, movable porcelain enamel restaurants. He refused to franchise or borrow and kept the company in the family, passing through E.W. Ingram Jr. and E.W. Ingram III to great-granddaughter Lisa Ingram, CEO since 2015. With about 345 locations against McDonald’s 36,000, scarcity fed a cult following known as the Crave.

• An internal magazine, the White Castle Official House Organ, started in 1925 to share employee news across regions.
• Imitators including White Tower, Little Castle and Blue Bell copied the castles and square burgers but not the supply chain.
• In 1980 officials in Fountain Hills, Arizona ordered 10,000 burgers for a festival, and in 1982 a Dayton DJ shipped 3,000 to U.S. Marines in Beirut.
• The 1982 Hamburgers to Fly program shipped frozen sliders by FedEx in minimum orders of 50, reaching 10,000 a week within months.
• The 2015 Las Vegas Strip opening, its first western expansion in over 50 years, sold 4,000 sliders an hour and closed for two hours to restock.