Free Famous Nathan by Mr. Lloyd Handwerker

other names: frankfurter (after the city of Frankfurt in his native Germany), “dachshund sandwich,” or “Coney Island red hot.” His creation was specifically a pork sausage lovingly nested in a warm bun.
    Others claim precedence—or at least incidence. At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in Saint Louis, a Bavarian immigrant named Anton Ludwig Feuchtwanger supposedly handed out gloves for his customers to handle the hot sausages he sold them. When that practice proved too awkward and expensive, Feuchtwanger’s wife proposed placing the frankfurter in a bun. He remains prominent in the lore because the name “Feuchtwanger,” when connected to sausage, is too hard to resist.
    The popularization of the hot dog has also been credited to Harry Stevens, a Brit who innovated concessions at American baseball games in the early twentieth century. On a cold day, when his ice cream sandwiches weren’t moving, Stevens instructed his staff to sell “dachshund sandwiches” instead. Ted Dorgan, a cartoonist commemorating the event, did not know how to spell “dachshund,” so he called them “hot dogs” instead.
    The mythology around the invention of the hot dog may be charming, but the actual facts are elusive. Smallish pork sausages known as Würstchen that were similar to the modern hot dog seem to have originated in the area near modern-day Frankfurt in the Middle Ages. “Weiner” is another spelling of Vienna, where a pork-beef variation became popular in the 1700s. “Dog,” as applied to sausage, arose from the fact that dogmeat was sometimes used in German sausage making. The first verified use of the term “hot dog,” as applied to sausage, cropped up in an 1892 New Jersey newspaper article.
    None of this detracts or diminishes from the incredible up-by-the-bootstraps story of Charles Feltman. The years immediately following the Civil War found him hauling a lowly pie wagon around the dunes and “sandy wastes” of Coney Island. The crowds had not yet descended upon the windswept beach, but even then, there were hints of the future. Feltman sold his fare to the horse-racing aficionados and to the swelling numbers of people who came to Coney for the bracing seaside air.
    For the first few years, Feltman worked his pushcart. Clams were the big sellers in the neighborhood. The humble bivalves were harvested in seemingly inexhaustible numbers along the shores of Sheepshead Bay, on the leeward side of the island, and to a lesser degree along the ocean shore. It was the clam, a cheap and abundant staple, not frankfurters, that was most closely associated with Coney during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Grilled clams, clam roasts, and the clambake were common features of a visit to the beach.
    Throughout the 1860s, the young Feltman brought pies from Brooklyn bakeries and delivered them to Coney Island businesses. He made the rounds of what was then a ramshackle collection of seaside saloons and hotels. Responding to popular demand, he began to sell seafood to the tourists from his pie wagon. But when the weather turned brisk, customers wanted not cold clams but hot food. How to serve up a hot sandwich from a pushcart?
    The mythology surrounding the rise of Charles Feltman records the specific circumstances of what happened next. The pie wagon entrepreneur presented his problem to a wheelwright named Donovan (first name or last is unknown) who had built Feltman’s original pushcart. Donovan worked out of a shop at East New York Avenue and Howard Street, on the far eastern edge of Crown Heights in Brooklyn. There he first fabricated an innovation that has lasted to this day, installing in the well of Feltman’s cart a charcoal brazier for the sausages and a metal warming box for the rolls.
    Thus, in the year 1867—other sources say 1874—came the birth of the hot dog, the frankfurter in a bun, on American