Fun fact: hot dogs are two different kinds of sausages, weiners and franks are not the same thing.
A weiner ("viennese") sausage is not the same as a Frankfurter Würstchen sausage.
American hot dogs are called Viennese sausages in Germany, but frankfurters in Austria.
Frankfurters are the ancestral hot dog, originating in Frankfort and usually made out of pork.
In the 18th century a butcher named Johann Georg Lahner moved to Vienna and added beef to his sausage recipe, creating Viennese sausages. Hence why the Viennese call their own sausages frankfurters.
All American hot dogs arrived through one of these two lineages, every city that had German immigrants, which was every city, had at least one sausage wizard appear.
This is why every city has its own variation of hot dog: literally an unbroken lineage tracing to one guy on a boat with nothing but a dream of sausages, totally unaware the guy next to him has the same dream but a different destination.
This is why every city has some claim that *they* invented the hot dog.
They did. Hot dogs speciated in this new environment, independently evolving and converging and some going extinct as neighboring hot dog species invaded.
This is why the history of hot dogs is so murky and dreamlike, a thing of legends, contradictory oral histories.
Every city a hot dog arrived in, its story was told by people who did not yet know English, communicated across a language gap to neighbors and their own children, etc.
In *this* city, a man named Feuchtwanger arrived from Frankfort and sold hot dogs by giving customers gloves to eat them with, when customers kept walking off with gloves he created edible handholders for his hot sausages: buns.
Did this happen? Who cares. It is a hot dog folk tale.
