Day when the world saw first slice of bread

Being the day when Chillicothe Baking Company of Missouri produced their first slice of baked bread, Michigan has a competing claim as the first city to sell bread sliced by Rohwedder’s machine. However, historians have produced no documentation backing up Battle Creek’s claim. The bread was advertised as the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.
St. Louis baker Gustav Papendick bought Rohwedder’s second bread slices and set out to improve it by devising a way to keep the slices together at least long enough to allow the loaves to be wrapped. After failures trying rubber bands and metal pins, he settled on placing the slices into a cardboard tray. The tray aligned the slices, allowing mechanized wrapping machines to function.
The Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune forwarded historical photographs to the show for possible use in the broadcast. “As you know, every inventor since has had the task of creating ’the greatest invention since sliced bread,’” the show’s spokesperson said. “This week’s ’Almanac’ will be a fun way for viewers to learn about the invention.”
Their Kleen Maid Sliced Bread proved incredibly popular, and was advertised as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” It was this slogan that led to the hyperbolic phrase we now use to describe an invention that has a huge impact on daily life.
The American inventor of the bread slicing machine was trained optometrist and former jeweller Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Having become convinced that he could invent and market an automatic bread slicing machine, he sold his three jewellery stores to finance its development. However a fire in his factory destroyed both the blueprints and prototype in 1917, which pushed back the development of the machine by a number of years.
Soon after its eventual release the invention quickly caught on as bakeries across the country clamoured to produce and market this new type of bread. The social impact was enormous and led to an increase in bread consumption due to the ease of simply reaching for another slice. Sliced bread even became a political issue when, at the height of the Second World War, it was banned due to concerns over the quantity of wax paper being used to wrap it. However, the ban was lifted after just three months, and sliced bread has remained a staple food ever since.