The story
For most of history, bread came as a whole loaf, and you sliced it yourself. Otto Rohwedder of Davenport, Iowa, set out to change that with a machine that could slice a whole loaf at once.
It took him years. A prototype he built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and he didn’t finish a working machine until 1928. That July 7, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, sold the first machine-sliced bread, under the name Kleen Maid Sliced Bread.
The bakery called it “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” Shoppers agreed. Wonder Bread began selling sliced bread nationwide in 1930, and by 1933 about 80 percent of the bread sold in the United States came sliced.
Once sliced bread was the everyday standard, it became the yardstick for anything new. In 1951, a columnist wrote that a performer “is the greatest thing since sliced bread,” and comedian Red Skelton said the same about television.
