Invention Of Sliced Bread

After 16 years of determined effort in the face of a series of setbacks that read like the plot of Gothic novel, Otto Frederick Rohwedder finally succeeded in producing a working version of his invention, the bread-slicing machine.

A jeweler by trade, Otto Frederick Rohwedder (USA) had something of an obsession with bread, filing more than a dozen patents relating to the production and sale of sliced and unsliced loaves. He began working on his first bread slicer in 1912, and when he asked bakers whether they thought it was a good idea they told him no, because the bread would go slate too quickly, so he expanded the scope of his invention to slice and wrap the bread.

His first major setback had nothing to do with the inventive process - in 1915 his doctor told him that he had only a year to live. Two years later, already defying this gloomy prediction, a second disaster befell him when a fire in his workshop destroyed his prototype and all his tools. A lesser man might have taken this as a sign that bread was not intended to be sold pre-sliced, but Rohwedder persevered, secured financial backing in 1922 and produced a working bread slicer in 1928.

For many years it was generally accepted that the first pre-sliced loaf of bread went on sale in Battle Creek, Michigan that same year, but in 2001 journalist Catherine Stortz Ripley (USA) of the Chillicothe Constitution Tribune in Missouri discovered an article in the paper's archive that suggested otherwise. Under the headline "Sliced Bread Is Sold Here", the paper reported on 6 July 1928: "Chillicothe Baking Co. the First Bakers in the World to Sell this Product to the Public", and pre-sliced loaves reportedly went on sale in Chillicothe the following day. In 2003 Rohwedder's son Richard told Stortz Ripley: "My father and Frank Bench (the owner of the bakery) were friends. When no-one else in the world would give my father's machine a try, Frank Bench did... Other bakers scoffed at the idea." They may have scoffed, but they soon had to eat their words - by 1933 an estimated 80% of bread sold in America was pre-sliced.

Source - The Book Of Inventions by Ian Harrison