From its humble beginnings in 1948 as a drive-in restaurant in southern California, McDonald's grew by the end of the twentieth century into the world's largest food service organization, having served up more than 100 billion hamburgers in half a century of operation. In 1998, the chain claimed 24,500 restaurants in 114 countries—with a new one opening every five hours—where 38 million customers a day are served, 20 million of them in the United States. In five decades, the Golden Arches, Big Macs, and Ronald McDonald have become among the most internationally recognized and controversial icons of American popular culture. Over the company's objections, the prefix "Mc-" has been used informally in English to describe any person or situation whose essential qualities are seen in terms of homogenization, predictability, or banality.

It all started in the late 1940s, on the crest of the postwar automobile boom, when brothers Richard...