It’s Friday again, and you know what that means – it’s time
for another Fun Friday Facts! As some of you will be aware, I sometimes ask my
readers to suggest a topic for this column. Reader @VikingtotheMax (aka my friend
Mark) wanted to know, “What was the greatest thing BEFORE sliced bread?”
If I had to guess, I would have said it was latex condoms, which
were invented in the early 1920s, several years before sliced bread, but I would’ve
been wrong. The
greatest thing before sliced bread was wrapped bread. Yes, I know, it’s
rather anticlimactic.
But etymologists (those are the scientists who study the
origins of words and phrases, not the ones who study bugs – those are
entomologists) believe that the phrase “greatest thing since sliced bread”
refers to a back page ad placed in the daily newspaper in Chillicothe, Missouri
on 6 July, 1928. The ad touted the Chillicothe Baking Company’s new bread
slicing machine, which it purchased from Otto Frederick Rohwedder of Davenport,
Iowa, the visionary who invented pre-sliced bread. The ad claimed that the
advent of pre-sliced bread (or as we call it now, pre-sliced bread) was the “greatest
forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” The first
recorded use of the idiom occurred in a 1952 interview comedian Red Skelton (if
you know who that is, you might be too old for the Internet) gave to the Salisbury
Times, a Maryland newspaper, in reference to the newfangled invention of the
day, television.
It was only after many setbacks that Rohwedder finally
managed to sell his bread-slicing machine to the Chillicothe Baking Company in
1928. He first invented the automated bread slicer in 1912, but bakers of the
era rejected the device, claiming that customers would want to be doing their
own bread-slicing, please and thank you. Clearly, Rohwedder was ahead of his
time.
As if that weren’t bad enough, Rohwedder lost not only the blueprints
but also the prototype for his bread slicing machine in a fire in 1917. No
quitter, Rohwedder was willing to jump right back on the sliced bread horse,
but couldn’t convince investors to fund the revival of the project. It wasn’t
until ten long years later, in 1927, that Rohwedder was finally able to produce
another working model of his bread-slicing machine, but by this time, the world
was ready.
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| This may be the very bread-slicing machine in question. |
Sliced bread quickly became popular, as customers loved the
convenient, uniform slices. It would take another innovator, baker Alexander
Taggart, to distribute sliced bread on a nationwide scale. Taggart was a baker
from the Isle of Man. His father had been a baker before him, and his father
was a baker before him. Taggart immigrated to the United States after the Civil
War, starting his first bakery in 1869. He teamed up with another baker, Burton
Parrott, to open Parrott-Taggart Baking Company. They would go on to found the
United States Baking Company, which would later merge with the National Biscuit
Company, to form Nabisco. Though Taggart and Parrott continued to sell their
baked goods under their own name, it would be this affiliation with Nabisco that
would help them make history.
On 24 May 1921, Parrot-Taggart Baking Company introduced Taggart’s
Wonder Bread, today known simply as Wonder Bread. In 1930, thanks to Mr.
Rohwedder and his stubborn refusal to give up on his dream of eating pre-sliced
bread in spite of long odds and much criticism, Wonder Bread became the first
loaf of sliced bread to be distributed nationally.
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| OMG NOW I'M GETTING ALL MISTY-EYED ABOUT FUCKING BREAD, FUCK. |
