Topped, yes, and with an infinite variety of good and awful combinations.  But equalled, never. 

How many innovations, in your lifetime, have you heard hailed as "The Greatest Thing since Sliced Bread?"  

Nearly eight decades have passed since July 7, 1928, when the Epoch of Whole Loaf Bread met the Dawn of the Sliced Bread Era at Frank Bench’s Chillicothe Baking Company at the corner of First and Elm in Chillicothe, Missouri.  Representing the DSBE was the bread slicing machine invented by one Otto F. Rohwedder of Iowa.

If ever anyone deserved the title of hard luck genius, Otto F. Rohwedder certainly does.  A jeweler by trade, and living at a time when the toaster was cutting edge technology but had no precisely sliced bread to fit into its slots, he had worked on his bread slicer for five years. 

Sensing he was close to success, "Roh" decided to sell his stake in the jewelry business to finance his bread slicer.  A 1917 fire, however, destroyed his work, and it took him another eleven years to recoup his losses and build the first operating slicer/wrapper model, with a patent assigned to his Mac-Roh Company of Davenport, Iowa.  

The outcome of the Chillicothe confrontation was a resounding victory for sliced, wrapped bread; seeing his sales climb twenty-fold in two weeks, Frank Bench benched whole loaf bread for good and Rohwedder soon had a backlog of orders from other baked goods companies.
 
For his sliced bread, however, Rohwedder earned little bread of his own; in a little more than a year the US would be devastated by the Great Depression.  Rohwedder continued patenting improvements on his machine, assigning them to his new Micro Corporation, but eventually had to sell his patent portfolio.  Micro and Mac-Roh (well, almost) have since found new life in new technologies, but as far as I know, no one has ever called them better than sliced bread.

Home of Sliced Bread

Posted by Judy.

Judy also writes for Latest Greatest Gadgets And Gizmos.