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The Day Sliced Bread Was Born, and the Day Washington Banned It

On July 7, 1928, a nearly bankrupt Missouri baker took a chance on a jeweler's bread-slicing machine. Fifteen years later, the U.S. government made his invention illegal.

On July 6, 1928, a small ad ran in the Chillicothe Constitution-Tribune promising "the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped." The next morning, the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, put the first machine-sliced loaves on its shelves, branded Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. Within two weeks the bakery's sales jumped 2,000 percent.

The machine was the obsession of Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa, who had spent more than a decade on a single problem: cutting a loaf into even slices without ruining it. His first prototype, built in 1912, and all his blueprints burned in a factory fire in 1917. He started over, and by 1927 he had a machine that did two things at once. It sliced the bread and immediately wrapped it, which was the whole trick, because an exposed sliced loaf goes stale almost overnight.

The reason nobody wanted the thing is that every baker in America was certain pre-slicing would dry the bread out and that no housewife would pay for it. Rohwedder was turned down again and again. The one man who said yes, Frank Bench, ran a bakery circling the drain, so he had nothing to lose. Bench installed the five-foot machine at the corner of First and Elm, and the inventor's young son, Richard, later recalled feeding the very first loaf into the blades. Within days, bakers from Kansas City and St. Joseph were driving to Chillicothe to get their loaves sliced while they waited for machines of their own.

It caught on faster than anyone predicted, helped by another gadget reaching kitchens at the same moment: the pop-up toaster. Uniform slices drop neatly into uniform slots, so the two inventions were made for each other. By 1933, roughly 80 percent of all bread sold in the United States was pre-sliced.

And then comes the part nobody remembers. On January 18, 1943, the U.S. government banned sliced bread.

The order came from Claude R. Wickard, the Secretary of Agriculture, who doubled as War Food Administrator. The stated reasons were conservation: sliced loaves needed heavier waxed-paper wrapping, the slicing blades ate steel the war effort wanted, and officials hoped to tamp down a bread-price spike. Housewives were livid. Sue Forrester of Fairfield, Connecticut, wrote to the New York Times that she now had to hand-cut twenty-two slices every morning "in a hurry," and that sliced bread was essential to "the morale and saneness of a household." New York's mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, piled on, arguing the ban actually created demand for steel knives and made the steel shortage worse.

The ban lasted about fifty days. On March 8, 1943, Wickard lifted it, conceding that "the savings are not as much as we expected."

Here is the strange coda. Neither Rohwedder nor Bench got rich. Bench's bakery closed in the Depression; Rohwedder sold the rights to his machine and finished his career on the payroll of a baking-equipment company. But his invention became the yardstick for every invention after it, literally. That 1928 ad line about "the greatest forward step since bread was wrapped" quietly mutated over the decades into the phrase we still reach for: "the greatest thing since sliced bread." By the 1950s Americans were calling movie stars and dishwashers the greatest thing since sliced bread, using the invention as the measure of inventions.

The parable holds up. A thing so convenient that people refused to give it up even in wartime, and a government that learned, in fifty embarrassing days, that you cannot easily un-invent a small daily luxury. Every time a new ban is proposed on something cheap and universally liked, the ghost of Claude Wickard is somewhere in the room, watching the savings fail to appear.

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