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Sliced Bread:
A Public Radio Commentary
by Bill Hammack
Listen using RealAudio
We've all heard the phrase "Its the best thing since sliced
bread." But was sliced bread really such a great thing? Yes!
Sliced bread was the culmination of a century of technological
innovation.
The end of the slice bread story starts with an Iowa Jeweler and
peddler named Otto F. Rohwedder, who preferred to be called
"Roh." At the beginning of the 20th century, toasters were in
vogue, and so Roh often heard on his sales calls to grocers that
customers liked toasted bread, but found it difficult to slice
the bread so it'd fit into the slots.
The toaster represents the crest of one wave of technological
innovation that brought us sliced bread. It began with a huge
effort to electrify the nation. Once homes were wired this
created a demand for household appliances, one of which was the
toaster.
So, propelled by the demands of the toaster, Roh built his first
bread slicing machine in Monmouth Illinois. fire consumed his
workshop destroying the machine. It took Roh a decade to finance
a new model.
A baker in St. Louis, Gustav Papendick, bought the second slicer
produced by Rohwedder. He improved the cutting action, but found
bakers objected to sliced bread: They felt the loaf would dry out
too quickly.
So, Papendick set out to invent a machine that would wrap the
bread, and keep it fresh. To do this he needed to keep the sliced
bread together long enough so his machine could wrap it. He first
tried rubber bands and then metal pins to keep the loaves intact,
but both failed. Finally a simple idea hit him: Put the bread in
a collapsible cardboard tray, which would precisely align the
slices so a machine could wrap them.
This sounds simple, but again a series of technological
innovations had to occur: If you are going to have uniform bread
trays, you need uniform bread. Here's a few things that happened
to give us uniform bread.
First, an engineering genius invented an automated flour mill. No
longer was it made by hand, it could now be made in vast
quantities. Then the technology for making identical loaves of
bread evolved. For example, the first ovens used embers, which
cooked the bread slowly and unevenly. Industrial ovens were
invented that blew an even steam of hot air past the dough. In
addition, the ovens were tunnels where the dough went in one end
and out the other so that bread could be mass produced. This
produced uniform bread, which could then be sliced automatically.
The problem of the loaf drying out remained. And here another
technological revolution saved the day: Plastic came about,
providing the perfect moisture-proof wrapper for a loaf.
All of these innovations came together in the time of the St.
Louis Baker, Gustav Papendick. His sliced bread made sales in St.
Louis jump by a whopping 80%. And most important it gave birth to
that phrase "The best thing since sliced bread."
Indeed.
Copyright 2003 William S. Hammack Enterprises
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