Colonel Sanders was not a real Colonel, but he was in the Army. He was a cook at Fort Lewis in Washington state during WWII. To feed the massive groups of soldiers, they needed to make food faster, so they engineered up new industrial scale pressure cookers to make a huge amount of fried chicken at once. After the war he was able to get a bunch of the machines, and move back to Kentucky and start a business. The “colonel’s secret recipe” was literally just using this Army surplus tech from WWII to start a bunch of chicken restaurants. My point is, really it ought to be called Washington Fried Chicken.