So in 1952, fed up with ruined meals, Stephen set out to make a better grill.
At the time, Weber Brothers Metal Works was filling orders for metal buoys for both the Coast Guard and the Chicago Yacht Club. So Stephen took two of the half spheres for the buoys and created a grill.
“As the story goes,” Kempster says, “he took it home, he fired it up with charcoal, and it didn’t work. The fire went out.” One of his neighbors was watching the spectacle and chimed in saying, “George, you gotta let some air in that thing,” according to Kempster. So the pair grabbed a pick from his tools and punched some holes in the lid. It worked.
“That was research and development in 1952,” Kempster laughs.
The new grill design resolved all the pain points for consumers back in the 1950s, Kempster explains. The enclosed dome shape sealed in the smoky barbecue flavors and gave backyard chefs better heat control while cooking their meals. The lid also allowed backyard cooks to easily snuff out the coals when they were done cooking and prevented the barbecues from filling up with water.
For a while, Weber-Stephens Products claimed the original kettle grill’s round body was superior to other grills on the market. “The unique dome shape reflects the heat evenly all around, just like a kitchen oven,” according to a Weber ad from the 1970s. But over years of testing, this assertion hasn’t held. “It reflects heat well, but we haven’t been able to prove it reflects heat any better than a square or a rectangle,” says Kempster, noting that the interior of kitchen ovens are rectangular. Grill efficiency lies in other design details, he explains, such as the positioning of the grates and air dampers.
Even so, “there’s a bit of a mystique in the shape,” says Kempster. “It’s a hard shape to manufacture because it takes really, really big presses to draw steel.” The design was also totally different than the boxy grills of the day. A popular early nickname for the ovoid grill was Sputnik.
Stephen marketed this first grill as “George’s Barbecue Kettle.” It sold for $29.95—the equivalent of around $270 today. He used the grill frequently to cook for family and friends and sold a few of them, but it took several years and many grill iterations later for the business to take off.