15 May 1940; What Happened?

15 May 1940 - McDonald's opens his first restaurant.

The business began in 1940, with a restaurant opened by brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald at 1398 North E Street at West 14th Street in San Bernardino, California (at 34.1255°N 117.2946°W). Their introduction of the "Speedee Service System" in 1948 furthered the principles of the modern fast-food restaurant that the White Castle hamburger chain had already put into practice more than two decades earlier. The first McDonalds with the arches opened in Phoenix in March 1953. The original mascot of McDonald's was a man with a chef's hat on top of a hamburger-shaped head whose name was "Speedee". By 1967, Speedee was eventually replaced with Ronald McDonald when the company first filed a U.S. trademark on a clown-shaped man having puffed-out costume legs.