I learned this today. We say, “the best thing since sliced bread”, but sliced bread has only been around since 1928.
Humans have been eating bread for thousands of years. 30,000-year-old starch residue has been found on rocks used for pounding plants. Early humans could have spread the starch on a flat rock and cooked it, making a flatbread. Charred remains of a plant starch bread were found in a Natufian fireplace dated from 14,500 years ago. Once humans started to farm, bread was usually made from different types of grain. The Sumerians appear to have invented leavened bread in 6000 BC. The Egyptians started adding yeast in 3000 BC. And the bread we eat today evolved from that.
Bread was made at home or bought from a baker. It came in different sizes, but it was always sold whole and cut at home. And this is what I always have to remind myself every time I research one of these “who invented” topics. Just because we are used to something, doesn’t mean it has always been obvious.
Various bread-cutting knives were invented towards the end of the 1800s, but bread loaves were a very inconsistent shape, and they were difficult to cut. This changed with the industrialization of bread production at the start of the twentieth century. Identically sized loaves of bread could be rapidly produced by machine.
In 1912, Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented a bread slicing machine. He could take the machine-made bread loaves and slice them. Unfortunately, his device didn’t work perfectly, and a fire destroyed his prototypes and blueprints. It took him another 16 years, but on July 6th, 1928, he sold the first sliced commercial loaves.
The first loaves weren’t great. The slices fell apart in the bag and sliced bread went stale much more quickly than uncut loaves. Rohwedder found a way to solve this by using a U-shaped pin to hold the loaf together. This kept the slices close together and stopped air from getting to them, keeping them fresh.
People were very surprised by sliced bread. There were newspaper articles about it and an ad in a newspaper had instructions on how to get the slices of bread out of the paper they were wrapped in.
As sliced bread improved, it became more popular. The Wonder Bread company was one of the first companies to distribute it from 1930. A lot of bakers said that sliced bread was just a fad, but it turned out not to be.
Sliced bread wasn’t just about saving time. When you slice your own bread, it is very difficult not to squash the bread. Also, it was possible to have uniform slices. You couldn’t do that with a knife.
In World War 2, sliced bread was banned to save resources, but so many people complained that it was quickly brought back.
The invention of sliced bread allowed for the invention of the toaster because bread slices were pretty much all the same size.
So, bread has been around for three millennia, but sliced bread only started in 1928. And that is what I learned today.
Sources
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sliced_bread
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_bread
https://www.history.com/news/who-invented-sliced-bread
https://time.com/3946461/sliced-bread-history/
https://www.pnas.org/content/115/31/7925
