How the Backyard Grill Has Evolved Over the Decades

A smoky backyard grill loaded with hamburgers and hot dogs is a staple of summertime celebrations in the United States, but grilling technology has come a long way over the past century. Grilling is distinct from barbecue, which has its own rich and regionalized history. While grilling involves cooking food directly over high heat from charcoal, wood or gas flames, barbecue generally refers to the slower cooking of meat over low, indirect heat and smoke.

Here’s how the backyard grill evolved over the decades, starting out West in the 1930s.

The first backyard grills appeared in California in the 1930s in the homes of wealthy suburbanites. Meant to evoke a romanticized image of Mexican rancho living, the California-style grills—confusingly called “barbecues”—were large outdoor fireplaces made of stone and cement.

“It’s what we would call today an ‘outdoor kitchen,'” says Robert F. Moss, author of Barbecue: The History of an American Institution. “It became a status symbol of the ‘good life’ to cook outdoors and have the whole family gathered around the big grill.”

As home and garden magazines promoted the laid-back “California lifestyle,” built-in barbecues began popping up in the backyards of upper-middle-class Americans nationwide. James Beard published Cook It Outdoors in 1941, which included instructions for building a wood-burning stone barbecue.

Henry Ford, oddly enough, was the first to popularize charcoal briquets as a new kind of fuel for grills. Briquets are pillow-shaped lumps made of sawdust and wood waste mixed with tar and cornstarch. Cars in the 1920s contained a lot of wood—the Model T used about 100 board feet for its frame and running boards—so Ford opened a sawmill in Michigan run by his cousin-in-law Edward G. Kingsford.

“Ford had all of these leftover scraps of wood at his sawmill and factories, and being notoriously cheap, he wanted to use every last bit of it,” says Moss.

The Ford Charcoal Company became the country’s largest producer of charcoal briquets, and Ford dealerships started marketing “Picnic Kits” for cars that included a portable grill and a bag of briquets for a roadside cookout. After Ford died in 1947, his heirs sold the charcoal division, which was renamed Kingsford.

During World War II, the U.S. government placed rationing restrictions on commodities like gasoline and food, which contributed to the popularity of backyard grilling, says Moss.

"Charcoal grills started as portable things to take on the road when you're out touring, but once gas is rationed, that’s not a viable form of entertainment,” says Moss. “Also, buying steak used up a lot of ration points, but you could still get plenty of ground beef and sausage. So for American families during wartime, a backyard cookout with hamburgers and hot dogs became a modest form of entertainment that didn’t use up all the ration tickets.”

Before the 1950s, the most common type of backyard grill was a brazier, an open metal box on four legs that held hot coals under a grill. But braziers had their limitations. Without a cover, the coals were exposed to wind and rain, and there was no way to raise or lower the heat for different types of food.

Enter George Stephen, a salesman at the Weber Brothers Metal Works in Mount Prospect, Illinois. At Weber, Stephen helped develop products like mailboxes, fireplace equipment and metal buoys for the Coast Guard. Stephen was also a family man (he had 12 children!) who enjoyed backyard cookouts but was frustrated with the standard charcoal brazier.

In 1952, Stephen took two halves of a metal Coast Guard buoy and built a prototype for the first “kettle”-style charcoal grill with a lid. Next, he installed some adjustable vents in the lid that effectively controlled the temperature of the coals. The iconic Weber kettle grill was born.

The Weber grill arrived just as Americans were moving by the millions to suburban tract houses complete with grassy backyards.

“The Weber coincided with a much larger mid-century movement in backyard culture,” says Moss. “Magazines and newspapers were loaded with the iconic imagery of dad in an apron and big chef’s hat ‘manning’ the grill. There was a rush of companies trying to sell new grilling products to all the suburban families.”

One of those enterprising companies was the Arkansas Louisiana Gas Co., which sold natural gas to utilities in Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas. In the early 1960s, the company offered gas customers the option of renting an Arkla gas grill for a $2.60 monthly surcharge on their utility bills.

“Everybody was trying to get in on the backyard barbecue craze, including the gas companies,” says Moss. “The early gas grills were permanent fixtures hard-piped into the gas line. It was a way to incentivize gas customers to use more gas instead of all that charcoal.”

The first portable gas grill with a liquid propane tank was the LAZY-MAN Model AP, sold by the Chicago Combustion Corp. in 1957. It retailed for $130 (about $1,500 in 2026 dollars). The 20-pound propane tank—now standard for gas grills—was modified from gas cylinders used by plumbers.

The postwar boom of the 1950s and 1960s was the “golden age” of backyard grilling, as described by a 1962 article in the Washington Evening Star: “Figures show blue sky cooking has hit a sizzling new high. It is estimated that before the summer’s end the United States will have consumed two billion outdoor meals... This year it is estimated $360 million will be spent on special outdoor cooking facilities.”

Conventional charcoal and gas grills continued to dominate the backyard grilling market in the 1970s and 1980s, but some interesting new products and trends also emerged.

In 1974, Atlanta businessman Ed Fisher opened Pachinko House, a store in a strip mall that sold two specialty items imported from Japan: a pinball-like game called pachinko and a clay “barbecue pot” called a kamado. U.S. servicemen stationed in Japan fell in love with the kamado in the 1950s when they discovered that its sealed design cooked chicken and ribs more evenly than conventional grills. Fisher attracted customers by grilling chicken wings outside his Atlanta store.

Fisher struggled to sell his Kamado Barbecue Grills until he came up with a catchy new name in the mid-1980s. On the phone with an advertising rep from the The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Fisher riffed on the distinctive look of his charcoal-burning Japanese grill. It was big, it was green and it kind of looked like an egg. Soon, the Big Green Egg was a fixture in Atlanta backyards and garnered an almost cultlike following nationwide (fans are called “EGGheads”).

During the 1970s oil crises, Americans looked for alternative energy sources. In 1978, Joe Traeger was working at his family’s heating business in Oregon when a visitor from a local lumber company brought him a 5-gallon bucket of compressed wood pellets made from scrap lumber. Over the next few years, Traeger developed the first pellet-burning furnaces for home heating.

As legend has it, during a fateful Fourth of July chicken cookout in 1985, Traeger stepped away from his gas grill and returned to find it engulfed in flames. Angry, he kicked the gas grill off the back deck and set out to create a better barbecue based on his pellet-furnace technology.

The first Traeger grill hit stores in 1988. But “grill” is actually a misnomer, says Moss, because the Traeger and other pellet grills cook food indirectly using smoke and heat, not flame. The grill is equipped with a hopper that feeds pellets into an electric burner to maintain a consistent temperature inside the grill, anywhere from 180 to 450 degrees Fahrenheit.

“The Traeger capitalized on the popularity of barbecue competitions, and folks bought it who wanted to do more than grill, but also the slow-and-low cooking and smoking you might do in a barbecue pit,” says Moss.

Barbecue purists may scoff, but the George Foreman Grill—full name: the George Foreman Lean Mean Fat-Reducing Grilling Machine—was a 1990s cultural phenomenon. The simple electric grill press arrived just in time to capitalize on a national obsession with low-fat eating and became a kitchen staple alongside bread machines and air poppers.

But George Foreman didn’t invent the George Foreman Grill. It was the brainchild of Michael Boehm, an industrial designer working for Tsann Kuen USA, an electronics manufacturing company. In 1993, Boehm came up with an idea for an electric indoor grill press that sat at an angle, so that grease and fat would drain easily. Boehm patented his countertop grill in 1994 and sold the rights to Salton Inc., which recruited the charismatic former heavyweight boxing champ as its spokesperson. Foreman once said that he earned "much more" than $200 million over the life of his endorsement deal.

For backyard grilling, there’s a large George Foreman model on a stand, and other manufacturers sell high-end electric grills made for apartment patios and other spaces that don’t allow charcoal or gas grills.

Starting in the 1980s, world-class steakhouses like Peter Luger in New York City and Gibson’s in Chicago began cooking their steaks using a new type of infrared broiler. Pioneered by the German manufacturer Schwank, infrared broilers use a gas or electric burner to heat a ceramic plate that emits radiant heat at temperatures as high as 1,500 degrees Fahrenheit. The high temperature quickly sears the surface of meats without drying them out.

In the 2000s, infrared technology moved from commercial kitchens to backyard grills. A popular configuration is a gas-powered grill with a dedicated infrared unit for high-temperature searing or a rotisserie area heated on three sides by infrared panels.

Around 2020, flat-top griddles emerged as the latest trend in backyard grilling. The advantage of gas-heated flat-top griddles is that they can cook a wide variety of foods without worrying about flare-ups or dropping food through grill grates. Moss says that manufacturers once known for a particular type of backyard grill now sell a little of everything to meet a diversified consumer demand.

“A company like Weber doesn’t want to be known as the charcoal grill company,” says Moss. “They sell gas grills. They sell pellet grills. Now they've got the flat-top griddles. Everybody is also leaning big into wireless and ‘smart’ technology, too.” The latest grills can be monitored and controlled with smartphone apps.