The journey to billions and billions began with a single humble hamburger.



History does not note the name of the customer, but that first request for service on this date at the new franchise restaurant on Lee Street in Des Plaines became the order heard 'round the world.The owner of the restaurant, Ray Kroc, lived in Arlington Heights. He chose nearby Des Plaines because he hoped to lure recreational travelers driving between Chicago and the lakes of northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin.



His particular genius, however, was not so much site selection or restaurant design as it was concept recognition: A year earlier, working as a traveling salesman of malted milk-mixing machines, he had come across a thriving hamburger joint in San Bernardino, Calif., run by Mac and Dick McDonald.



He sensed the possibilities.



The McDonald brothers were uninterested in expanding, so Kroc entered into a franchising agreement with them, bringing first to Des Plaines and later, after he bought out the brothers in 1961, to the rest of the world, a chain of drive-in restaurants defined at first by what they were not.



The restaurants were not slow--food was served quickly, since it was prepared assembly-line style and was ready at the moment of order. They were not expensive--the 15-cent burger (just under 90 cents in 1996 dollars) was a mainstay. They were not hangouts--Kroc kept out pay phones and jukeboxes. And they were not risky--the premises were clean and well-lighted, and the food always tasted the same.



That first order began not only the spread of the McDonald's empire--swollen by the mid-1990s to around 15,000 locations in about 70 countries--but also the franchised fast-food revolution in American dining.



That revolution has conquered highways, airports, malls and school lunchrooms, as well as our very culture, where fast-food slogans ("You deserve a break today") and mascots (the Ronald McDonald promotional clown) have become as common and recognizable as any quotations or icons from fiction.



Kroc died in 1984, the same year his flagship Des Plaines restaurant, which had been remodeled several times, was torn down. The company then built a nearly exact replica of the original on the site and turned it into the McDonald's Museum.