Smith

The question rattled around inside my baseball cap last Saturday afternoon while I stood behind the glass cases of the only grocery store within 15 miles of my trapper’s shack, watching the essential worker as she pushed the sliding table on her whirling stainless steel Hobart machinery, feeding a chub of peppercorn salami into one end and plucking quarter-inch meat frisbees from the other. Watch your fingers.

Yummy. None of your dry, artisan, artsy fartsy, goes-great-with-Cabernet, Italian salami here. No siree, this was workers’ food, good solid proletarian lunchmeat all dressed up for the dance. Sliced salami could, indeed, be the best thing since sliced bread. But wait a second, how did sliced bread come about anyway? And what was the best thing before sliced bread? Time for another lesson from “History without Underpants.”

Factory-sliced bread has only been around for a hundred years or so. The inventor of the bread slicer was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, born July 6, 1880, in Des Moines, Iowa. He grew up in Davenport, Iowa, and entered the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology and Otology in Chicago, from where he received a degree in optics in 1900.

In the early 20th century the optometrist’s trade was just being developed and a person needing eyeglasses purchased them from a jeweler. Rohwedder operated three jewelry stores of his own in St. Joseph, Missouri, until 1916. That year he sold his stores and moved back to his hometown because he had been visited by a brilliant idea.

His idea, which he had begun working on since 1912, was to create a bread slicer that would automatically cut loaves of bread into slices for consumers. He worked on several prototypes, including one that held a sliced loaf together with metal pins. This model did not prove to be very tooth-friendly and was unsuccessful. His biggest challenge came in late 1917 when a fire destroyed his design blueprints at a Monmouth, Illinois, factory that had agreed to build his better slicing devices.

It would take several years for him to get it all back together, but Rohwedder continued to make refinements to his design. In the course of his research he realized from talking with bakers that he would need to find a way to prevent a loaf of sliced bread from going stale. By 1927, he had devised a solution to this problem: a machine that would slice the bread and also wrap it.

Meanwhile, a man named Charles Strife invented the spring-loaded, automatic, pop-up toaster, but ran into a series of insurance claims from hand-sliced bread jamming the toaster mechanism and burning down a few houses. Chuck’s toasters desperately needed uniformly shaped pieces of bread, and he urged Otto to go ahead, please, with his slicing machinery ideas.

The toaster safety issue gave Rohwedder the marketing wrinkle he needed to get his latest version of the bread slicer off the ground. Sliced bread was safer than whole loaf bread. He filed for patents on his new slicing-and-wrapping devices and sold his first machine to the Chillicothe Baking Co., in Chillicothe, Missouri, in 1928.

On July 7 of that year, the company sold its first loaf of sliced bread, which they marketed as Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. Demand climbed swiftly. Within a year, Rohwedder found himself scrambling to keep up with the pace of requests he was getting from bakeries to supply his slicing machines and Mr. Strife’s toasters were all the rage.

In 1929, just as he was getting his Davenport-based Mac-Roh Sales and Manufacturing Co. up and running, the Great Depression hit and his company took it in the shorts. In order to put bread on his own table, Rohwedder was forced to sell rights to his invention to the owners of Micro-Westco Co. of Bettendorf, Iowa, who purchased the machines and hired Rohwedder to serve as a vice president and sales manager within its newly formed Rohwedder Bakery Machine Division.

Even while the United States slipped into economic gloom, sliced bread became more and more popular. Sales skyrocketed nationally beginning in 1930 when big city folks got wind of sliced bread. Wonder Bread, packaged with the balloon-type dots on the wrapper just like today, began producing the product on its own specially designed equipment.

By 1933, bakeries were selling more sliced bread than unsliced bread. The only time sliced bread experienced a downturn was during the middle of World War II, when Agriculture Secretary Claude Wickard banned its sale in an effort to hold down prices during the time of rationing.

Rohwedder, meanwhile, become known as the “father of sliced bread,” and spent the last 10 years of his life traveling and speaking to groups around the country. He died in Concord, Michigan, on Nov. 8, 1960. One of the first models of his original slicing machine is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.

OK, that’s sliced bread. What was the best thing before sliced bread? I have no idea, but if I were able to travel through time and meet the 2.7 billion folks alive on this planet when Wonder Bread made its debut, I’d ask them what was the greatest thing on earth before that, and I bet you 50 pesos that the answer would be bread, hot from the oven, unsliced, was the best thing before sliced bread.