Sliced Bread (1928)

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http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascitystar/6405440.htm

   A fellow ADS-Ler was kind enough to forward the above, about the 75th
anniversary of "sliced bread."  It checks out.
   Notice that the 1950 story below does not use "the greatest thing since
sliced bread."  That probably was coined by Red Skelton a year later, as I'd
posted here.
   This is perhaps of interest to someone from Missouri, or to someone
writing a book on sandwiches.  The two stories below are from the ancestry.com
newspapers.



   3 April 1929, DECATUR DAILY REVIEW (Decatur, Illinois), pg. 10?, col. 3:
_Sliced Bread, New_
   _Conklin Product_
_Loaf Cut and Wrapped_
   _Ready for Use._
   Thirty years ago the thought of buying freshly roasted and ground coffee
at the grocery store was laughable; a housewife would not think of asking her
grocer for sliced bacon or minced ham.  But now you can buy fresh, sliced
bread.  Yet, it will kepp fresh, too.
   Ralph O. Conklin of the Conklin Bakery company, announced Wednesday
morning the installation of a machine, the first in the United States east of the
Mississippi, which automatically slices a loaf of bread, keeps the pieces
togather, and delivers them to the wrapping machine.  The slices are placed in a
shallow card-board trap which is wrapped with the bread.
      KEEPS FRESH.
   Before the machine was installed, tests were made to be sure that the
bread would keep fresh after the package had been opened.   The only necessary
precaution is that the package be opened at one end only.  After the required
number of slices are removed the paper is folded over the remaining bread.
   O. F. Rohwedder of Davenport, Ia., the inventor, has been working on the
machine for four or five years.  Though it has been in use a short while in a
few other towns, the Conklin Bakery in Decatur is the first east of the
Mississippi to obtain one.
      17 SLICES PER LOAF.
   By means of a series of thin knives moving alternatively in opposite
directions, the whole loaf is sliced in one operation.  The machine is able to cut
aobut 700 loaves of bread an hour, each slice being of uniform thickness,
perfectly straight, seventeen slices to a loaf.


   29 March 1950, CHIILLICOTHE CONSTITUTION-TRIBUNE (Chillicothe, Missouri),
pg. 1,  col. 4:
_First Loaf of Sliced Bread_
_Was Produced in Chillicothe_
   One of the greatest steps taken in the baking business was started right
here in Chillicothe, syas H. J. Kolbohn, operator of the Kolbohn Bakery.
   That step was the marketing of the first commercially-sliced bread.
   M. F. Bench, street commissioner here now and for many years a baker, was
the one who introduced those first loaves of bread to the world--right here in
Chillicothe.
   "It caught on fast," Bench recalls, "too fast.  Neither the inventor nor
myself ever made a cent out of the invention itself."
   The commercial slicing of bread caused two great advancements in the
business, Bench said.
   The first was that it improved the quality of bread.  "A loaf of bread has
to be good to be cut by the machine.  And before the sliced bread came in,
loaves didn't have the quality they have now," he explained.
   The second caused by the invention was that it made people buy more bread.
 Perhaps folks found themselves eating more bread when they didn't have to
slice it.  Maybe it was the habit many have of throwing the butt ends away, or
waiting until last to eat them.
   Bench began in business here in 1916 with a bakery at Clay and Martin
streets.  About 1931, or 1922, he built a plant on Elm street, now occupied by the
Whistle-Vess company.
(Col.5--ed.)
   It was in that building, under the name "North Missouri Baking company,"
that Bench put on the first sliced bread.
   A freind, with whom he had done business before, invented the slicer.  He
patented the machine years beforethe first loaf of bread was put on the
market.  The man, O. F. Rohweddler (sic), had made dies with which to construct the
machine.  But before he could get to work, the building, housing the equipment
burned.
   By the time he was able to build another machine, some years had passed
and the patent had expired.  So when the machine was put in use here in 1928,
the inventor was unprotected by patent, Bench says.  The first sliced loaf of
bread was produced in July of 1928.
   The use of the machine spread much more quickly than Rohweddler or Bench
had anticipated.
   "It was no time at all," Bench recalls, "when bakeries all over the nation
were building their own machines.  Other companies took right over."
   There was some skepticism here by some men who thought their "wives had
little enough to do as it was without taking another job away from her."  But,
according to Bench, the sliced bread was welcomed by the majority of most
buyers.
   And look at all the fingers which haven't been cut because of it.