In July of 1928, the world experienced the event to which every other scientific accomplishment is compared. Pre-sliced bread first appeared on store shelves and marked a key step in the mechanization of daily life.

Iowa-born jeweler Otto Frederick Rohwedder (photo) invented a crude prototype of his bread slicer in 1912, but a series of problems, including a fire that destroyed his blueprints as well as the prototype, prevented him from refining the design and building a working model until 1928.

Bakers resisted Rohwedder’s idea, certain that their bread would fall apart and quickly go stale once it was sliced. Rohwedder addressed that concern by adding to his machine the capability to wrap the bread in wax paper once it was sliced. (His first attempt to combat staleness by using hat pins to keep the pieces of bread together was unsuccessful.)

The first loaf of pre-sliced bread went on sale July 7, 1928, in Chillicothe, MO. It was made available at a bakery owned by M. Frank Bench, a friend of Rohwedder’s, and called “Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.”

According to an article in the February 1930 issue of Popular Science Monthly, which sold for $0.25, “The machine and its conveyor system are electric in operation, being driven by a small motor.” The bread slicing machine would divide a loaf into 29 even slices and could cut 1,000 loaves in one hour.

Rohwedder was granted Patent No. 1,867,377 for a “Machine for Slicing an Entire Load of Bread at a Single Operation” in 1932 (see a figure from the patent below). He sold the patent the next year.

In 1930, Wonder Bread, then owned by Continental Baking, began to commercially produce pre-sliced loaves of bread, popularizing sliced bread and making it common in households and widely appreciated for its convenience. By 1932, the availability of standardized bread slices had boosted sales of automatic pop-up toasters. Within five years of the bread slicer’s invention, American bakeries were selling more sliced than unsliced bread.



Otto Rohwedder’s electrical bread slicing machine, shown here in a St. Louis bakery in 1930, revolutionized the way bread was consumed.

A 2003 article published in The Kansas City Star, commemorating sliced bread’s 75th anniversary, noted a slight hiccup on the staple’s path to world domination:

“In January 1943, at the height of World War II, the government ordered bakeries to stop slicing bread. The country needed airplanes more than it needed bread-slicing blades. The ban did not go over well. It was lifted three months later. A story March 9, 1943, in the Constitution-Tribune announced the lifting of the ban under a headline that read: ‘Mrs. Housewife Can Relieve Herself of Troublesome Task.’”

Other rumors circulated as to why the sliced-bread ban was imposed, including to conserve wax paper and also to conserve wheat and to lower bread and flour prices. After lifting the ban, Claude R Wickard, the US Secretary of Agriculture at the time, as well as head of the War Food Administration, stated, “Our experience with the order … leads us to believe that the savings are not as much as we expected.”

One of the first models of Rohwedder’s original slicing machine is now housed at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC (see photo below).



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Editor’s note: This article was originally posted on July 7, 2014 and edited on July 7, 2019.