“What was the best thing before sliced bread?”*…
Rohwedder’s bread slicer in use by the Papendick Bakery Company in St. Louis
Some products are so ubiquitous that it can feel as if they were never invented at all.
Take sliced bread. Around 130 years ago, the idea of buying a pre-sliced loaf would have been met with confusion, writes Jesse Rhodes for Smithsonian Magazine. “In 1890, about 90 percent of bread was baked at home, but by 1930, factories usurped the home baker,” Rhodes writes. But the two breads weren’t the same thing–”factory breads were also incredibly soft,” she writes, making them difficult to slice properly at home with a bread knife.
Since breadmaking had moved to factories, why not bread slicing as well? On this day in 1928, in Chillicothe, Missouri, the Chillicothe Baking Company became, in the words of its plaque, “The Home of Sliced Bread.” It was the place where the bread-slicing machine was first installed, wrote J. J. Thompson for Tulsa World in 1989. Thompson was speaking with the son of the bread-slicing machine’s inventor, Richard O. Rohwedder. His father, Otto F. Rohwedder, was a jeweler who started work on the bread-slicing project years before…
It took a surprising amount of technological know-how to make the bread that birthed the expression: “Take a Look at the Patents Behind Sliced Bread.”
* George Carlin
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As we reach for the PB and J, we might recall that it was on this date in 1868 that Alvin J. Fellows patented his Improvement in Tape Measures– the first spring-click (retractable) tape measure.
