Bread: Sliced Bread

The earliest barley bread appeared in about 10,000 BCE. It was a flatbread less than one inch thick and required no slicing. Later, wheat, rye, and leavening agents were introduced, making much larger loaves that needed to be torn by hand or sliced with a knife. At the beginning of the twentieth century, an Iowa-born inventor, Otto Frederick Rohwedder, recognized that the slicing of entire loaves would be helpful. He struggled for twenty-six years before his machine went on the market in Battle Creek, Michigan, in 1928, earning him the title “Father of Sliced Bread.” During the process, Rohwedder knew that slicing the bread was not his only goal. He needed to devise a way to hold the slices next to one another for portability and longer-lasting freshness. First, he tried hat pins, which joined several slices to each other. He soon discovered that this method was not practical. His final solution was to create a slicing machine that also wrapped all the slices together.