The last few pondering topics have been quite “deep and meaningful”, so today we go for a lighter fun fact topic…
Did you know that the concept of sliced bread was invented by Otto Rohwedder from Iowa in the 1920’s. He created the first commercial machine to cut a full loaf of bread into slices in one go.
The Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri were willing to try his invention and became the first place that sliced bread was manufactured and sold.
At first many bakers were very sceptical about the concept of sliced bread and felt that if it was sliced before it was sold the bread would go stale too quickly or fall apart. But Otto, being the ever intrepid inventor, first thought about using pins to hold the loaf together after it was sliced to keep it fresh longer. Having to remove the pins when you wanted a slice was quite a nuisance and would not work on a mass production basis. His next idea was to change the packaging to thick wax paper, this did the trick to stop the bread from getting stale too quickly.
From there the bread slicing machine became very popular in America. Bakeries started advertising the pre-cut loaves as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped” which lead to the popular saying “the best thing since sliced bread”!
Your homework for today is ponder on sliced bread. Just let your mind take you down any path it comes across and see where it takes you.
Ponder away!
