On occasion, you may have heard it said of some wonderful gadget, “This is the greatest invention since sliced bread!” This is intended to be both a compliment and a reference to how revolutionary and world-changing the invention is. It’s worth bearing in mind, though, that while people have been slicing bread for eons, pre-sliced, packaged bread has only been available since 1928, when Otto Frederick Rohwedder introduced the world’s first mechanical bread slicer.At first sales were not spectacular; bakers complained that pre-sliced bread would dry out quickly. Then a slicer-owner figured out how to slice and bag the bread simltaneously and the revolution began. The first national baker to use the slicer was Wonder Bread.
In an amusing afternote, the Toastmaster company had invented a pop-up toaster four years before sliced bread, but sales of manually sliced toast were slow. The pop-up toaster and uniformly sliced bread was a marriage made in heaven. By 1933, only five years after its introduction, American bakeries were turning out more sliced than unsliced bread, and the rest, as they say in the pulps, is history.
(Liberally edited and re-written by JAK from web material.)
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