Today, I am thankful for those who set a new standard for greatness.
Throughout time, humans have conceived of certain innovations that have set us on a path towards success. Tens of thousands of years ago, our ability to harness fire as a tool was the single achievement that propelled us to the top of the food chain. We learned to use fire to our advantage to cook our food, keep us warm in cold climates, explore the dark unknown, and clear fields for harvesting and domestication. However, we really did not create fire. Inventions like the wheel (circa 3500 BC), the nail (3400 BC), and the compass (~250 BC) are human-made devices that would allow us to build vehicles to explore our world in a systematic way. Moreover, the eventual adaption of the wheel for use on waterwheels (50 BC) and pulleys would allow us to harness energy to our advantage. As the Scientific Revolution came to be, the Gutenberg printing press (1450 AD) and the steam engine (1712) allowed large communities to live together and share information in a civilized manner. Human co-existence would allow us to reach new heights, especially as science and technology were married up over the last few centuries. In due time, we learned to harness various forms of energy, such as steam, electricity, and natural resources, to power trains, cars, airplanes, and rockets. We have mastered quantum physics to build radios, televisions, personal computers, and our mobile devices.
However, our ability to garner and store food in a rapid and efficient manner was instrumental in ensuring our biological advancement. Refrigeration played a massive role in allowing us to avoid spoilage of our nutritional resources, but today I wanted to herald an invention that has seemed to serve as the standard by which all others are judged – sliced bread. Now, the truth be told, bread making – the art of mixing and heating water and some grain (like wheat or corn) – has been around for nearly 10,000 years, as has the knowledge that if we mix in some yeast extract, our bread will rise to new heights. However, loaves of bread were often broken in rather unceremonious ways until Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an American Midwestern child of German immigrants, solved the problem. Born in Davenport, Iowa, on this day (July 7) in 1880, Otto studied optometry and became a jewelry retailer in Missouri for most of his young adult life. As the story is told, one day he sold it all after he came upon the idea of creating a machine that could effortlessly cut bread into small flat pieces, or slices, that could easily be covered with some spread (butter, jam, or other condiments) to make a quick treat or a sandwich.
By 1916, he developed a prototype of his bread slicer using metal pins, pulleys, and alternating rows of knives that would move up and down in asynchronous ways to secure and slice the bread into even parts. However, his original blueprints were lost in a fire in 1917. After recouping his losses, he started over, this time also adding in a device that would wrap the bread to avoid staleness. After selling his first machine in 1928 to the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri, the world was worked up into a frenzy. Rohwedder struggled to keep up with the popular demand from numerous bakeries around the country, especially as bread came into such high demand during the Great Depression. Others would follow suit, including The Wonder Bread Company, who designed a slightly different machine to slice its bread. In less than 6 years, sliced bread was outselling unsliced bread.
About two decades later, in an interview with the Salisbury Times in 1952, the comedian Red Skelton was asked to comment on the advent of a novel innovation – television. His response caught the hearts of Americans: “Well, it’s the greatest thing since sliced bread”. Today, Rohwedder’s original invention of the ‘greatest thing’ resides in the Smithsonian Museum of American History Institution in Washington, DC.
All this talk of bread has left me hungry and ‘wondering’ one simple question: What the heck did folks compare the bread slicer to when it first came out?
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