A little over 100 years ago, hot dogs were just cheap sausages stuffed into buns and sold for a few cents on street corners, at fairs and sporting events. By the 1970s, hot dogs, still cheap sausages stuffed into buns, were such an iconically American food that a leading car company invoked them to give its lumbering vehicles a patriotic sheen. The Chevy jingle, “We love baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet,” was a major earworm.
How did that upgrade in status happen? Like a lot of things involving hot dogs, it’s not clear. Unanswered hot dog questions include when and where they first appeared, why they’re called “hot dogs” and how the hot dog got its bun. There are plenty of stories claiming to provide answers, but very little evidence to support those claims.
The earliest known appearance of the name in print is a passing reference in an 1884 article in an Evansville, Indiana newspaper. It’s obvious from the article that hot dogs were already a well-known, cheap street food sold by peddlers.
Despite being called frankfurters and wieners, hot dogs aren’t really either. A real frankfurter is a pork sausage first made in the German city of Frankfurt during the Middle Ages. Wiener, which is German for Viennese, refers to a sausage that became popular in Vienna (Wien) in the 18th century. Hot dogs have their origins in sausages immigrants brought to the United States in the 19th century, but what sets them apart is mechanization.
“The hot dog is an industrial food,” historian and hot dog expert Bruce Kraig wrote in his book, Hot Dogs: A Global History. “Small butcher shops make their own handcrafted sausages — usually aided by machinery of some sort — but the commercial product sold by billions across the world is made in large quantities by machinery in a virtual automated process.”
And that’s where Iowa enters the story.
The state doesn’t have its own famous hot dog variant like the Chicago dog or Detroit’s Coney. We can’t even claim the corndog, which was introduced at the Texas State Fair in 1942. But an Iowan did revolutionize how dogs are produced.
Ray T. Townsend — dubbed “a Gutenberg for the hot dog industry” by the Wall Street Journal — was born in Des Moines in 1913. Growing up, he trained as a blacksmith, working in his father’s shop. Townsend studied mechanical engineering at Iowa State, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1934. During World War II, he worked in a munitions plant, where he designed a machine to handle faulty bullets. In 1946, Ray opened Townsend Engineering, a factory in Des Moines manufacturing food-processing equipment, Townsend quickly had his first big success with an efficient mechanical hog skinner.
“The company eventually went on to become the world’s largest designer and manufacturer of skinning, stuffing and injection equipment for meat, poultry and seafood processors,” Meat + Poultry wrote when Townsend died in April 2011. “Townsend obtained more than 100 U.S. patents, plus more than 300 international patents, covering a spectrum of fields including co-extrusion, skinning, trimming, linking, meat harvesting and curing and marinating during his long and highly successful career.”
Among the many machines Townsend created, the Frank-A-Matic is probably the most famous. But to appreciate the Frank-A-Matic, you have to know a little about how meat trimmings become hot dogs.
Hot dogs are made from a slurry-like meat mixture of “one or more kinds of raw skeletal muscle from livestock (like beef or pork) and may contain poultry meat,” all of which has been chopped and processed into “minute particles” to quote a description from the USDA. “Smoking and curing ingredients contribute to flavor, color and preservation of the product.” Water, both in liquid form and as ice, is added to the “batter,” as the mixture is known, to make the end product “juicy.”
The batter is injected into the casing, formed into links and cooked. Originally hot dogs, like other sausages, had casing made of animal gut (pig or sheep) but in 1925, Chicagoan Edwin Freund invented a cellulose casing for the batter, introducing the “skinless” hot dog to the world. Cellulose casings were standardized in size (animal gut varies) and cheaper, which is why skinless varieties are the overwhelming majority of mass-produced hot dogs. But humans can’t digest cellulose, so it had to be cut away before the factory could ship the finished product. Cellulose casing was eventually replaced with casing made of collagen, which also has to be cut away because it’s inedible. In the pre-Frank-A-Matic days, cutting the casing was done by hand.
Townsend’s machine automated and streamlined the process from the moment the batter filled the casing and even sheared the dogs skinless at the end. When it hit the market in 1962, the Frank-A-Matic had competition. The Oscar Mayer company had introduced its own automated linker and processor, nicknamed “the wiener tunnel.” But the superior design and efficiency of Townsend’s machine quickly made the Frank-A-Matic the industry standard.
Before the Frank-A-Matic, workers at a meat-processing plant were doing well if they produced 500 skinless franks in an hour. With the Frank-A-Matic, plants were making over 30,000 per hour with fewer workers.
Ray Townsend’s inventions made him rich, and earned him many honors. He was also an innovative boss — in the early ’70s he introduced a four-day workweek at his factory — and he and his wife Cleda were philanthropists. After a long career leading Townsend Engineering, Ray turned the business over to his son Ted.
Ted grew up with the family business, but took a different path from his father. He went to the University of Iowa and earned a degree in finance. Like his parents, Ted was a philanthropist, and he became widely known for two Iowa-based projects.
In 2002, Ted helped launch the Great Ape Trust of Iowa, a research facility in Des Moines that housed a small colony of bonobos. After many problems, the facility was reconstituted as the Ape Cognition and Conservation Initiative, under new leadership.
Ted also spent years trying to create a giant indoor tropical rainforest in Coralville. Earthpark was supposed to be a 20-story terrarium with 4.5 acres of free-roaming monkeys and tropical birds, trees and plants, as well as some unspecified prairie-dwelling animals. Despite support from Sen. Chuck Grassley and enthusiasm from Coralville city leaders, Earthpark never broke ground.
In 2005, Townsend Engineering was sold to Stork Food Systems, a Dutch company. Two years later, it was acquired by Marel, an Iceland-based company. In 2015, Marel closed the Des Moines factory Ray Townsend opened in 1946, shifting production to Georgia. The company still makes versions of the Frank-A-Matic.
Dog dealers near you
Don’t see you favorite hot dog on the list? Let us know: editor@littlevillagemag.com
Eastern Iowa
Cracken’s Grill, 2221 Rochester Ave, Iowa City; Closed Sun; Mon 3-8 p.m.; Tues-Thurs and Sat 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Fri 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
Zolly’s Grill, 201 S Clinton St Ste 166, Iowa City; Closed Sun; Mon-Wed 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Thurs-Sat 11 a.m.-12 p.m.
2 Dogs Pub, 1705 S 1st Ave, Iowa City; Sun 10 a.m.-10 p.m.; Mon-Sat 10 a.m.-11 p.m.
Hudson’s Southside Tap, 482 Hwk 1 W, Iowa City; Sun 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Mon-Thurs 11 a.m.-9 p.m.; Fri and Sat 11 a.m.-10 p.m.
The Flying Wienie, 103 8th Ave SW, Cedar Rapids; Closed Sun; Mon-Fri 11 a.m.-6 p.m.; Sat 11 a.m.-2 p.m.
Loosies, 1611 32nd St NE, Cedar Rapids; Closed Sun; 11 a.m.-7 p.m.
Moco Game Room & Hot Dog Bar, 1600 E Ave NE, Cedar Rapids; Mon-Thurs 2 p.m.-2 a.m.; Fri-Sun 11 a.m.-2 a.m.
Portillo’s, 2741 E 53rd St, Davenport; Sun-Thurs 10 a.m.-10:30 p.m.; Fri and Sat 10 a.m.-11 p.m.
Central Iowa
Daisy’s Dog House, 1620 S Kellogg Ave #108, Ames; Sun 11 a.m.-7 p.m.; Closed Mon; Tues-Fri 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 4:30-9 p.m.; Sat 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
Lachelle’s Fine Foods, 2716 Ingersoll Ave, Des Moines; Sun 11 a.m.-3 p.m.; Closed Mon; Tues-Sat 11 a.m.-9 p.m.
Ted’s Coney Island, 3020 Ingersoll Ave, Des Moines; Sun 10:30 a.m.-8 p.m.; Mon-Sat 10:30 a.m.-9 pm.
Ted’s Coney Island West, 2667 86th St, Urbandale; Closed Sun; Mon-Sat 10:30 a.m.-8:30 p.m.
Sugar Shack Diner, 550 36th Ave SW Ste K2, Altoona; Sun 7:30 a.m.-2 p.m.; Mon-Fri 11 a.m.-8 p.m.; Sat 7:30 a.m.-8 p.m
This article was originally published in Little Village’s August 2026 issue.
