When WED (the predecessor to Walt Disney Imagineering) were designing Disneyland, they decided to lay it out using a "hub-and-spoke" system. In the "hub-and-spoke" system, Guests are guided to a centralized part of the park, called the hub. From there, they can choose one of several paths (or spokes) which will lead them to various areas of the park. Essentially, they chose to the design of a wheel to map out their park. It is a very efficient system, making getting around easy for Guests.
The hub-and-spoke was not invented by Disney, but the application of the system in a theme park was revolutionary and showed on a nice scale how effective the system could be.
Soon after Disneyland opened, several executives from Pan Am (I believe, though it might be Delta) were touring the park and were amazed at how effectively the hub-and-spoke system worked and thought they could apply it to air travel.
A few months later they had rearranged their flight patterns to have all of their flights go into a centralized hub airport where passengers could connect to other flights going to other parts of the country or even other parts of the world.
So, when you are flying from Boston to Italy via Chicago, you can be cursing the man, the myth, the legend himself, Walt Disney and the "efficient" hub-and-spoke system.
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