Pizza Hut got its name because the sign only had room for eight letters
Two Wichita State students borrowed 600 dollars from their mother in 1958 and opened a pizza place. The sign they had fit just eight letters, so the name had to be short: Pizza Hut. Within a year they ran six outlets, and the chain eventually spread to nearly twenty thousand restaurants worldwide.
Dan and Frank Carney opened in Wichita, Kansas, on 31 May 1958 and began franchising the next year, starting in Topeka. Growth was quick: 140 locations by 1966, over 300 by the end of the decade, and in 1969 the brothers took the company public. By 1971 it outsold every rival. A future Hall of Fame football coach, Bill Parcells, worked there as a student and weighed buying a franchise before choosing coaching.
Not every idea stuck. In the early 1970s the company tried a Mexican fast-food spin-off, a burger joint, a steakhouse and a barbecue chain; all four had shut by 1980. PepsiCo bought Pizza Hut in 1977, when it had passed 4,000 outlets, and in 1997 spun it off with Taco Bell and KFC into the group later called Yum! Brands. The stuffed crust arrived in March 1995 and became one of its most popular lines within months.
The chain was surprisingly early to the internet. In August 1994 it piloted PizzaNet around Santa Cruz, letting people order delivery from their own computers through a server in Wichita. In 2001 it sent a vacuum-sealed pizza about 15 centimetres across, small enough for the oven, to the International Space Station, where cosmonaut Yuri Usachov ate it.
Its red-roofed buildings, with trapezoid windows, became roadside landmarks from 1969. Who drew them is disputed, credited either to the Chicago architect George Lindstrom or to a Wichita friend of the brothers, Richard Burke, reportedly paid 100 dollars per building. One writer called them a strange object, ignored by architecture journals yet among the most conspicuous buildings in America, and some 6,304 still stood in 2004. Nostalgia has since pulled the old logo and 1980s-style interiors back into use.
Source: Pizza Hut
