Opinion

Iowan was the father of sliced bread

Monday, October 31, 2005

The other day I was engaged in a conversation with an older gentleman. He was extolling the virtues of a hybrid car he'd seen and had driven. In his description he mentioned that the car was the "Greatest thing since sliced bread."

That is an expression that we all know, but one that isn't used all that much anymore. I got to thinking that that expression would not be used at all had it not been for one far-seeing fellow who is not known to the general public any more, and probably has never been properly appreciated in the history books -- an Iowan, Otto Fredrick Rohwedder, 1880-1960.

Most people living today never knew a time when bread was not sliced. The Egyptians first developed breads as we know them today some 6,000 years ago.

They discovered that if they let their bread dough sit out in the hot Egyptian sun, it would puff up, and if they baked this dough in an enclosed oven, it would retain some of that fluffiness.

At that time, bread and beer occupied the same high place atop the Egyptian food chain -- both being affected by those strange bubbles. In the 17th Century, with the invention of the microscope, it was revealed that those strange bubbles were the yeast cells that were causing the leavening in bread and the fermentation in beer.

So, for those 6,000 years, until 1928, people bought their bread in the loaf, sometimes wrapped, sometimes (ala the French baguette) unwrapped. The European bread was crusty, and even the American bread was more dense then than it is today. Housewives and chefs got to be very good at cutting nice even slices from a loaf of bread. But not everyone developed the knack, and frequently slices of bread served at the dinner table were very thin on one end and thick at the other.

Once the slices began to be lopsided it was very difficult to get back to even slices, when slicing a loaf of bread.

Apparently this was the situation in the Rohwedder household. Along about 1912, Otto Rohwedder decided there must be a better way to slice bread -- if only there was a machine that would make the slices uniform.

Upon investigation, Rohwedder found that there was no such machine available, so he decided to perfect one himself. Rohwedder was not a baker, or an engineer.

In 1912 he was living in St. Jo Mo., where he owned and operated three jewelry stores (with Optometry departments). By 1916 he had given up his jewelry stores and had moved back to Davenport, Iowa., to develop his invention.

Things were going well, when in 1917 a fire destroyed a Monmouth, Ill. factory, which was to have produced the first slicing machine.

Rohwedder's blueprints and his slicing machine prototype (with reciprocating blades) went up in smoke. (The basic design for bread slicing machines has not changed to this day.)

It was not until 1928 that he was able to come up with necessary new financing to go into production on his machine. Sliced bread had a lot going for it. Even slices allowed toasters to toast the slices evenly, and uniform slices made sandwich preparation a great deal easier.

The future seemed bright for Mr. Rohwedder and his wonderful machine. Yet, oddly enough, Rohwedder's slicing machine was not readily accepted by the public. The bakers scoffed at the very idea. The perception was that slicing the bread would cause the loaf to dry out too quickly. And of course, the bakers would have to buy additional equipment, and add an additional step to their baking operation. Finally, Mr. Rohwedder convinced a baker friend of his, Frank Bench, of Chillicothe, Mo., to try one of his machines.

The new sliced loaves were introduced as "Keen Maid Sliced Bread," from the Chilicothe Baking Co.

It started slowly, but soon demand for "Sliced Bread" skyrocketed.

A year later, Rohwedder reported, that his company was making "frantic, feverish efforts" to supply the machine to bakeries. In Plainview, sliced bread did not catch on as quickly. My Dad, Walter, arrived in Plainview in 1930, and being a progressive young baker, he bought a brand new new bread slicer. I remember his saying that the new machine cost $175. At the time, a sliced loaf sold for a cent or two more than an unsliced loaf Even though he slashed the price of sliced bread to the same price as unsliced, his customers did not flock to the new product.

Instead they clung to the notion that the sliced bread dried out too quickly. At one point he nearly sent the slicer back to the manufacturer to stop his payments on the machine, as he could not see that it was going to be a sound investment. As always, it took a little time for a new idea to catch on in rural Midwest.

In the beginning, an important point was missed in the process of selling sliced bread. It was not just enough just to slice the loaf and put it in a paper sack. It had to be sliced and wrapped in a sealed bag at the same time.

Original efforts to hold the slices together with "hat pins," or rubber bands failed utterly. (In the basement of our bakery, we have an old bread slicer that Stan Fallick's father had bought in the early '30s. The machine is large, is hand driven, and cuts one slice at a time from a loaf, like a meat slicer. It was so slow that the bakery rarely used it, but it does represent that transition period between unsliced and sliced bread.)

Finally, Rohwedder had a brainstorm. He put the bread in a collapsible cardboard tray, which would precisely align the slices so that another machine could wrap the loaf in wax or cellophane, as it came through the slicer. After that sales really took off and the rest is history.

(When I was a kid growing up, most bread was wrapped in waxed paper wrappers. The waxed wrapper kept the loaf from drying out, and recycled waxed wrappers were in great demand, for covering bowls in the refrigerator, for sending sandwiches to school and work, and the most important use, as far as kids were concerned, to make the surfaces of playground "slippery slides" realty slick. Still, nothing is better than waxed bread wrappers for this purpose.)

Even today the traditional European bread -- with its crispy crust and soft center -- does not lend itself to a slicing machine. One time, we were visiting the Normandy beach country in France.

We stopped at a small country inn and ordered sandwiches for our evening meal. Instead of slices of bread around our little, thin slice of meat we each had a small loaf of bread, cut lengthwise, which made easy eating impossible. The next morning we were seated in the tiny restaurant awaiting our eggs and toast.

We heard sounds from the kitchen, which sounded like a lumberman's buzz saw. My Dad, not one for making jokes, observed, "I'll bet they're sawing that bread left over from last night."

We all laughed, but moments later--sure enough, our waitress brought a good sized platter of thick slices of bread, quite burned on one side, with our plates of scrambled eggs. That wonderful bread, so crusty on the outside and soft on the inside, from the day before was now uniformly tough and a real test for strong jaws to chew.

Mr. Rohwedder's reciprocating blades slicer would have been no match for that bread. By 1933, American bakeries were selling more sliced than unsliced bread.

Unfortunately for Mr. Rohwedder, the stock market crash of 1929 had left him in dire straits and he was forced to sell his invention to Micro-Westco Co. of Bettendorf, Iowa.

Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise as Micro-Westco took over the production and promotion of the slicer and made Otto Rohwedder the vice president and sales manager of their new division, "Rohwedder Bakery Machine Division of Micro-Westco Inc."

At any rate, Mr. Rohwedder and his wife, Carrie retired comfortably, with no financial problems, to Albion, Mich., in 1951.

Source: www. ideafinder. corn/ breadsticer.htm

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