8 Things Invented in Jacksonville, Florida

Jacksonville invented or launched Burger King in 1953, the first disposable contact lens in 1987, Firehouse Subs in 1994, and possibly the beer six-pack in 1945. The Blue Angels flew their first demonstration here in 1946, and Southern rock started in local clubs in the 1960s. Most of the rest belongs somewhere else.

Jacksonville's problem was never inventing too little. We kept inventing things and handing them to Miami, Nashville, and St. Augustine without asking for a receipt.

Burger King Started in Jacksonville in 1953

The chain everyone knows opened on Beach Boulevard in July 1953 as Insta-Burger King. The whole business was built around one machine. Keith Kramer and Matthew Burns bought the rights to a mechanical flame-broiler called the Insta-Broiler and opened at 7146 Beach Blvd. That was the plan. Buy the machine, sell what comes out of it.

It nearly died. A year later two Miami franchisees, James McLamore and David Edgerton, bought the struggling operation, swapped the Insta-Broiler for a gas grill they called the flame broiler, renamed everything Burger King, and added the Whopper in 1957. The DNA of one of the world's largest burger chains is a Jacksonville appliance experiment that didn't work.

The original building still stands at 7146 Beach Blvd. It's a grocery store now, which is more useful than it ever was as a test kitchen for a concept nobody wanted yet.

Acuvue Was the First Disposable Contact Lens

Johnson & Johnson's Vistakon division in Jacksonville launched Acuvue in 1987. Not the first contact lens. Not the first soft lens. The first one you were supposed to throw away instead of cleaning it every night.

That sounds obvious now. At the time the industry thought it was insane, because building a precise piece of optical equipment and then putting it in the trash contradicted every assumption about what durability was worth.

Vistakon got here by acquisition. Optometrist Seymour Marco moved Frontier Contact Lens Company to Jacksonville in 1962. J&J bought it in 1981, renamed it Vistakon, and by 1994 shipped 1-Day Acuvue, the first daily disposable lens.

The engineering gets lost in the business story. Vistakon's manufacturing process, Stabilized Soft Molding, took production from 100,000 lenses a day to a million. That happened at a 69-acre campus on Centurion Parkway, which is a lot of land to commit to something you throw away on purpose.

Firehouse Subs Started in Mandarin in 1994

Firefighter brothers Robin and Chris Sorensen opened the first Firehouse Subs on San Jose Boulevard in Mandarin on October 10, 1994. Their father put in 43 years with the Jacksonville Fire and Rescue Department. The brothers had less than $100 in the bank.

The concept was simple. Steamed subs, a firehouse aesthetic, and a name that meant something to the people running it.

Thirty years later it's more than 1,300 locations. In December 2021, Restaurant Brands International closed a $1 billion all-cash deal for the chain. That's the same company that owns Burger King, which means two Jacksonville sandwich ideas now sit under one corporate roof about seventy years apart.

Firehouse is still headquartered here. For a chain that size, that almost never happens.

The Blue Angels Flew Their First Show in Jacksonville

The Navy Flight Exhibition Team, which the world later knew as the Blue Angels, flew its first demonstration on June 15, 1946, in Jacksonville. Lt. Cmdr. Roy "Butch" Voris led it in a Grumman F6F-5 Hellcat. They didn't have the name yet. That arrived a month later.

Where exactly it happened depends on who you ask. The Navy's own history puts the first demonstration at NAS Jacksonville, the team's home base. Britannica, the Jacksonville History Center, and several aviation records put it at Craig Field, during an air show and dedication ceremony. Both are Jacksonville. Nobody has reconciled the two.

The team practiced over swampland on purpose. Voris figured alligators made a more forgiving audience than people who might file a complaint.

The first Blue Angels fatality happened at NAS Jacksonville that September, when Lt. j.g. Ross Robinson didn't recover from a dive during a Cuban Eight. They still fly here. If you want dates and parking, we keep a NAS Jax Air Show guide current.

Jacksonville Was America's First Movie Capital

Before Los Angeles had studios, Jacksonville had them. More than thirty film companies operated here between 1908 and the 1920s, drawn by warm weather, cheap locations, and no union labor. It's the least believable chapter in Jacksonville's history and it's fully documented.

The Gulf Between, shot here in 1917, was the first feature film made in Technicolor anywhere in the United States. It's a lost film now. A handful of frames survive. Babe Hardy started his career here in 1914, years before he was half of Laurel and Hardy.

The story worth knowing is Richard E. Norman. He founded Norman Studios in Arlington in 1920 and made race films: movies with all-Black casts, made for Black audiences, where the leads were doctors and pilots instead of maids and porters. The Flying Ace, from 1926, follows a Black World War I fighter pilot turned railroad detective. It's the only surviving Norman film and the only known surviving film from Jacksonville's silent era. The aerial dogfights were faked, because in 1926 Black Americans weren't allowed to fly.

The Norman Studios complex at 6337 Arlington Road is the only studio left standing from the era. It's the Norman Studios Silent Film Museum now. Jacksonville kept the movie-house habit long after the industry left, which is why the marquee at Sun-Ray in Five Points is on a sticker and the Technicolor thing is not.

Southern Rock Started in Jacksonville

Lynyrd Skynyrd formed here in 1964 out of Robert E. Lee High School, now Riverside High School. The name is a jab at gym teacher Leonard Skinner, whose position on long hair the band did not share. "Free Bird" and "Sweet Home Alabama" are songs the whole world knows, and they started in Jacksonville practice spaces.

The broader claim holds up. .38 Special formed here in 1974. Molly Hatchet came together here in 1971. The Allman Brothers had deep roots in the local jam scene. When people say Southern rock, they're describing something that came out of Jacksonville neighborhoods and clubs. The full roster of famous musicians from Jacksonville runs longer than most people expect.

One of the most recognizable band names in music is a snarky tribute to a teacher who got mad about hair length. That's the kind of specific, stupid detail that ends up in a city's permanent record.

The Camel Rider Is Jacksonville's Own Sandwich

A pita packed with ham, salami, bologna, cheese, and Italian dressing came out of Jacksonville's Arab American community, here since the 1890s. It's ours the way the cheesesteak is Philadelphia's.

The origin is debated but usually traces to Joseph Assi, a Lebanese-born baker who left Beirut in 1958 and ran the Gold Room restaurant. He introduced a cold-cut pita in the early 1960s and called it a desert rider. The camel rider name came later and read as a pejorative at first. The community absorbed it anyway. Now it's on menus at more than fifty local restaurants.

Order it with a cherry limeade. That part isn't the invention. That's just how you get through August here.

Jax Brewing May Have Invented the Six-Pack

Jax Brewing Company, founded in 1913 by William Ostner, a German immigrant who came out of the St. Louis brewing trade, gets credit for one of the first six-pack carriers. The story runs like this. Around 1945 or 1946, national breweries were switching to aluminum cans and Jax couldn't afford the canning equipment. So the operation bought burlap sacks from Tower Hardware, printed Jax Beer on the side, and sold six bottles to a sack for $1.29.

Sources disagree on how many sacks. Most accounts say 100,000. The Jacksonville Historical Society has put it at 3,000. Nobody has settled that.

Nobody patented it either. Pabst, Schlitz, and National Bohemian all claim a version of the origin story, and Coca-Cola says Asa Candler beat everyone with a carton in 1923. No one can prove it, because nobody thought a burlap bag was worth protecting.

What's certain is that a Jacksonville brewery worked it out during a packaging crisis and went broke anyway. Jax Brewing closed in 1956. The building still stands at 1701 W. 16th Street in Durkeeville.

What Jacksonville Did Not Invent

• Famous Amos. Wally Amos was born in Tallahassee and raised there until he was twelve. He started the cookie company in Los Angeles in 1975. The Jacksonville connection is zero. It's a Florida claim that drifted north over time.
• Datil peppers. These are St. Augustine's, brought by Minorcan settlers in the 18th century and still the signature heat of St. Johns County. Sharing a state does not give us a claim on their pepper.
• Maxwell House. The plant has run in Jacksonville since 1910 and is the last one left in the country, but the coffee was invented in Nashville in 1892 and named after a hotel there. We roast it. We didn't think of it. When the wind is right downtown you can smell it, which is worth something, just not a first.
• MGM. Metro Pictures, one of MGM's three ancestor companies, was founded in Jacksonville in 1915. It produced its films in New York, Los Angeles, and Fort Lee. MGM itself formed in Culver City in 1924. We have the incorporation paperwork, not the movies.

We invented the disposable contact lens and the burlap six-pack. One of those built a 69-acre campus on Centurion Parkway. The other one is a building in Durkeeville with a fence falling over.