I’m a big fan of Garrison Keillor’s “Writers Almanac” on public radio; I even subscribe to a daily email of the program.
I’m pretty sure that Keillor has researchers who dig up the information he spotlights on the show, but his delivery of the content and his daily poem are very entertaining.
On July 7, he started the program with this item: “Sliced bread was sold for the first time on this date in 1928. Up until that time, consumers baked their own bread or bought it in solid loaves.”
“The greatest thing since sliced bread.” How often have you heard that description of something new on the market?
Bread is one of our oldest and most basic sources of nourishment, and just the mention of it brings back vivid childhood memories for me. My mom was a great baker of bread. I’d come in from the barn after morning chores starving, and the house would be filled with the wonderful aroma of fresh baked bread. That’s one of the sensory memories that hangs on in my brain.
A thick chunk of that warm bread (especially the crusty heel of the loaf), slathered with butter and dripping with honey or homemade strawberry jam or apple butter, was a staple of my breakfasts when I was a kid. My mouth is watering as I write this!
But let’s get back to Garrison’s item about sliced bread. He told of a jeweler named Otto Frederick Rohwedder from Davenport, Iowa, who worked for years perfecting a bread slicer. A prototype he built in 1912 was destroyed in a fire, and it was not until 1928 that Rohwedder had a fully working machine ready. He tried to sell it to bakeries, but they laughed at him and told him that pre-sliced bread would get stale and dry long before it could be eaten. He tried sticking the slices together with hatpins, but it didn’t work.
Finally Rohwedder hit on the idea of wrapping the bread in waxed paper after it was sliced. So he built a rather cumbersome, 5-foot-long and 3-foot-high slicing and wrapping machine. Still no sale. But then he took a trip to Chillicothe, Mo., and met a baker who was willing to take a chance. Frank Bench agreed to try the monstrous slicing and wrapping machine in his bakery. The proclamation went out to kitchens all over Chillicothe, via ads in the daily newspaper: “Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped — Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.” Sales went through the roof. Rohwedder not only gave Americans the gift of convenience and perfect PBJ sandwiches, but he also provided the English language with the saying that expresses the ultimate in innovation: “The greatest thing since sliced bread.”
That phrase, which has become a common way of hyping a new product or invention, was part of an advertising slogan for Wonder Bread, the first commercial manufacturer of pre-wrapped, pre-sliced bread. As more and more “convenience” products rapidly penetrated the American home, automated bread-making was not only an invention benchmark, but also a sort of symbol of the mechanization of daily life from the 1930s onward. Like electric toasters, which required uniform slices!
As long as we’re talking about bread and specifically Wonder Bread, here’s something you might not know. Bread had been used since the 17th century to clean the frescoes on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. When the famous painting was restored between 1980 and 1994, the artisans doing the work used Wonder Bread! Remember how spongy Wonder Bread was? I guess that quality made it perfect for use on the Sistine Chapel, and besides, with its 27 ingredients, it never went stale.
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