Unlike the Weber kettle, the gas grill doesn’t have one tidy origin story — it has two competing company histories that both claim the title of “first.” The company history pages of LazyMan Gourmet Grills (formerly Chicago Combustion Corporation) and Modern Home Products / Charmglow tell different versions of who actually invented the outdoor gas grill, and the two accounts flatly disagree with each other on both the year and the company.
A Commercial Broiler First
The oldest thread runs through Chicago Combustion Company, founded in Chicago in 1932 by Louis McGlaughlin to build industrial and commercial gas burners, according to LazyMan’s own company history. Its ARGIL burner became known for precise flame control, and McGlaughlin, after relocating to New York, adapted that burner technology into a gas-fired commercial broiler called the “BROILBURGER.” LazyMan’s history states the BROILBURGER was the centerpiece of the company’s booth at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where it caught the attention of restaurants that wanted charcoal flavor without the hassle of charcoal. Early BROILBURGER units, per LazyMan, were actually fired by Ford Charcoal Briquets before later versions switched to full gas with lava rocks standing in for charcoal. Through the 1940s, that burner technology was folded into commercial utility stoves, still nowhere near a backyard patio.
Two Rival “First” Claims
Here the two histories genuinely conflict. LazyMan’s own account says that until the mid-1950s the gas grill business was “almost exclusively found in commercial cooking,” and that Chicago Combustion Corporation sold the first-ever portable gas grills in 1954, with two other companies — Charmglow and Falcon — releasing their own competing portable grills shortly afterward. Modern Home Products, the company that owned the Charmglow name, tells a different story on its own site: it credits its founder, Walter Koziol, with inventing the world’s first outdoor gas grill in 1960, marketed under the trade name “Perfect Host” — a 22½-inch round portable cart unit built from steel, running on natural or LP gas.
These can’t both be strictly true. LazyMan’s version puts Chicago Combustion six years ahead of Charmglow and frames Charmglow’s grill as a fast-follower product; MHP’s version omits Chicago Combustion entirely and claims the world’s-first title for its own 1960 design. Each is a company’s own account of its history, not independently verified, and outdoor cooking coverage of the period doesn’t settle which came first — only that both companies were building and selling gas grills within a few years of each other in the mid-to-late 1950s.
Propane Makes It Portable
Whichever company got there first, the piece that made a gas grill practical for a backyard rather than a restaurant kitchen was fuel. LazyMan’s history credits Don McGlaughlin, Louis’s son, with sourcing 20-pound propane cylinders for the new portable grill — tanks that, at the time, were used almost exclusively by plumbers rather than by cooks. By 1959, LazyMan says, its portable Model AP sold for $131.25, and that year marked the company’s first real national sales spike for a residential gas grill. In 1960, Chicago Combustion also began wholesaling permanent natural-gas grill installations to the New Jersey Natural Gas Company, which billed customers $1 a month for 39 months to cover installation — an early sign that gas grills were being sold as a home fixture, not just a portable appliance.
From Round Steel to Cast Aluminum
On the Charmglow side, Modern Home Products’ own history describes a rapid string of design changes once the Perfect Host caught on. By 1961 the Charmglow name had become well known enough that MHP renamed itself Charmglow Products. In 1962, Koziol re-engineered the original round steel grill into a rectangular painted-steel design with a hinged lid — a shape MHP’s history calls a more efficient grill concept than the round original. By 1964 the company had introduced what it describes as the first rustproof cast-aluminum rectangular gas grill with a patented hinged lid, a design MHP’s own materials say became widely copied across the industry. In 1966, the Chef’s Choice series added a one-piece cast bottom and, according to MHP, received an industry award for design — the company’s account of its own accolade, not an independently confirmed one.
The Charmglow line didn’t stay with the Koziol family the whole way through, however. MHP’s history records that in 1969–1970 the Charmglow name, along with its grill and lighting products, was sold to the Beatrice Foods Company, though the Koziols retained the underlying company assets and reinstated the Modern Home Products name once the sale’s non-compete period ended in 1987.
What the Rivalry Left Behind
Regardless of which company’s “first” claim is taken at face value, both histories point to the same underlying shift: sometime between the mid-1950s and early 1960s, gas burner technology that had spent two decades in commercial kitchens moved onto a backyard patio, adapted to run on portable propane tanks instead of piped commercial gas lines. That’s the part the Chicago Combustion and Charmglow accounts actually agree on, even if they can’t agree on whose grill got there first.
Keep reading
- The Invention of the Weber Kettle Grill
- The Charcoal Briquette: Henry Ford’s Backyard Invention
- How Postwar America Invented Backyard Barbecue
- Baltimore Pit Beef: History of a Roadside BBQ Tradition