Want lies with that?

Other claims abound. The city of Seymour claims that its "Hamburger Charlie" Nagreen invented the hamburger at the 1885 Seymour Outagamie County Fair. But claims made by Nagreen, a larger-than-life local businessman, must be treated with skepticism. He also claimed to have invented the name "hamburger" despite its having been in common use for at least 100 years at the time.

Probably the best of the unverified claims is that of the Bilby family of Tulsa, Okla.. They claim that their great-grandfather, Oscar Weber Bilby, first put together his wife's yeast buns with ground-beef patties at his annual Fourth of July parties. Although there is not a shred of evidence to support the claim, other than the metal griddle forged by the burger patriarch and still in use in the family's restaurant, Weber's, the claim deserves some respect for the simple reason that no one has ever contested it. None of the other claimants mention a bun.

But there is one contender whose claim to having invented the hamburger can truly be said to be unassailable. The sandwich we think of today as the hamburger was almost certainly invented by Walter Anderson, a Wichita, Kan., grill cook who first made the sandwich in either 1915 or 1916. Anderson was the first to cook standardized, flat ground-beef patties on a custom griddle and to serve them on identical white buns. The claim is supported both by nearly contemporaneous newspaper accounts and by the fact that Anderson, with his partner, E.J. "Billy" Ingram, founded in 1921 a restaurant called White Castle, which still makes a nearly identical sandwich today. Moreover, because it was White Castle that created the fast-food business in the U.S., and the hamburger business in particular, Anderson and Ingram deserve credit not just for inventing the hamburger but for inventing the culture that helped make it our national sandwich.

Texans, however, can take pride in one consoling fact. A hamburger restaurant in Austin, Dirty Martin's Kum-Bak, founded only five years after White Castle, also remains in business today and serves some of the best hamburgers in the country.