Civilization took a delicious step forward on July 7, 1928, when the Chillicothe Baking Co. of Missouri began selling their immediately popular “Kleen Maid Sliced Bread.” The convenience became such a psychological staple of American life that when the government issued a brief wartime ban in 1943, an exasperated housewife famously wrote that officials failed to realize “how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household.”
The inventor of the slicing machine, Otto Rohwedder, nearly lost his invention to history when a massive fire destroyed his prototype and blueprints in 1917. It took him a grueling decade to secure the funding and rebuild the machine, and his very first commercial client—the Chillicothe Baking Co.—saw their sales skyrocket by a staggering 2,000% within the first few months of utilizing it.
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