When someone describes something new as "the best thing since sliced bread," you might wonder about them, but the first sliced bread honestly was a big deal.
Consumers didn't care? Boy, was that wrong! Read how popular the amazing new sliced bread really was at The Atlantic. Link -via Kottke
We owe sliced bread as we know it to Otto Rohwedder, who built the first commercial loaf-at-a-time bread-slicing machine. As Paul Wenske recounts in The Kansas City Star, Rohwedder spent 13 years perfecting the technology and struggled to kindle interest in the enterprise; "many bakers rejected the invention, saying the bread would fall apart and grow stale too fast. They contended consumers didn't care whether their bread loaves were sliced." They were wrong. The Chillicothe Baking Company, in Chillicothe, Missouri, finally put the machine to work in 1928 and it was a hit.
Consumers didn't care? Boy, was that wrong! Read how popular the amazing new sliced bread really was at The Atlantic. Link -via Kottke