The Greatest Thing Since Sliced Bread – a Brief History of Sliced Bread
It has only been recently that this fascinating fact has been known to the general public. For decades the fact that sliced bread was invented in this Missouri city has been forgotten. For many years Battle Creek, Michigan, claimed credit for inventing sliced bread, but there is no documentation to support this idea.
The greatest inventor of sliced bread was the Iowa inventor, Otto Rohwedder. Starting in the year 1912 he began working on a machine that would be able to slice bread in order to sell it in sliced form to the public. The problem was not slicing the bread: a problem he was quickly able to master. The problem came in finding a way to keep the bread fresh.
Once bread is sliced it begins to age far more rapidly than when kept as a whole loaf. Rohwedder quickly understood than in order to make a viable bread slicing machine he would have to be able to find a method of wrapping the bread along with the slicing to keep it as fresh as possible. This is the problem that would take years to figure out.
A solution came in 1928 with the assistance of Marion Francis Bench of the Chillicothe Baking Company. Together the two found a solution to the wrapping problem and were able to start producing pre-sliced bread to sell to the public.
Unbeknown to most of us until 2003, an article was published in the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune touting the new invention at the time. On the 7th of July, 1928, this headline was splashed across the Constitution-Tribune: “Sliced Bread is Made Here. Chillicothe Baking Co., the First Bakers in the World to Sell This Product to the Public.”
This is the earliest known reference to the commercial availability of sliced bread. Forgotten for decades, it was rediscovered in 2001 by reporter Catherine Stortz Ripley, while working on a history book of the area. Even still it did not make the mainstream media until 2003, when news of sliced bread’s invention here in Chillicothe, Missouri made headlines once again, this time with a far wider audience.
After the device was developed by Rohwedder and Bench, a company in St. Louis picked up on the idea and began producing not only the slicing machines as well as selling sliced bread. From here it would continue to spread.
Today it is almost impossible to think of bread without thinking of sliced bread. It has changed the way that we look at bread. Few inventions in the history of the world, particularly in recent times, have so fundamentally changed the way we look at such a basic product.
Bread is one of the first inventions if not the first invention of civilized man, and it is understandable why we should look at such an invention as sliced bread as such a powerful innovation. It will take many a year before such a powerfully innovative product will come into existence again.
