The Best Thing Since...
July 7, 1928 - Today was the day the first loaf of sliced bread was sold commercially. The bread came from the Chillicothe Baking Company, in Chillicothe, Missouri, and the innovation was thanks to a determined engineer named Otto Rohwedder.
The machine that Rohwedder created not only sliced the bread, but it also wrapped it. Rohwedder had conceived of the breakthrough over ten years earlier, but he was delayed when a fire destroyed a factory that was implementing his original blueprints.
New pop-up toasters had recently become popular, so the advent of ready-to-go sliced bread worked perfectly in this brave new breakfast world.
One of Rohwedder's earliest bread slicers is now on display in the Smithsonian Institute.
