We take pre-sliced bread for granted. It has even become part of the language: “It’s the best/greatest thing since sliced bread.” But Iowa-born Otto Frederick Rohwedder did not begin selling his pioneering bread-slicing machine until 1928. It could automatically slice a thousand loaves of bread per hour.

At first bakers were not enthusiastic about Rohwedder’s invention. They claimed that a full, unsliced loaf helped keep the bread fresh and flavorful, the way it had for over 30,000 years of bread baking. But another food-prep invention two years earlier would helped promote sales of his new bread slicer.

A pre-sliced loaf of bread like this one was unknown before 1928, when the German American inventor Otto Rohwedder perfected his revolutionary bread slicing machine. PHOTO: Fran Hogan, CC-BY-SA-4.0 via Wikimedia Commons

A fellow Iowan had developed the first practical pop-up toaster. Charles Perkins Strite’s new toaster was designed for restaurants and produced four evenly toasted slices. Previous toasters could only toast one side at a time, and it was difficult to consistently cut toast bread into equally thick slices by hand. Variations of Strite’s 1926 commercial toaster would soon become common in home kitchens around the globe, and help encourage the sale of pre-sliced bread for toast and sandwiches.

Today, even in Germany, pre-sliced Toastbrot is popular, and pre-sliced bread can be found all around the globe, even if the thickness of the uniform slices varies by country and region from 10 to 18 mm (0.39-0.71 in), or in some cases as thick as 24 mm, or just under an inch (“Texas toast”).

Who was Otto Frederick Rohwedder?
Otto Rohwedder (1880-1960) was born in Des Moines, Iowa to Claus Rohwedder (1845-1922) and his wife Margeretha née Jannssen (1848-1920), as one of the couples’ five children (four boys and a girl). Claus had come to Davenport, Iowa from his homeland in the district of Dithmarschen in what is now Schleswig-Holstein in 1866. He met and married his wife in Iowa in 1869.

An undated photo of Otto Frederick Rohwedder following his retirement to Albion, Michigan in 1951. PHOTO: Frank Passic, Historic Albion Michigan

Although Otto Rohwedder was born in Des Moines, he grew up and attended school in Davenport. That is one aspect of Rohwedder’s life that caught my attention. My own mother was also born in Davenport to a German father from Schleswig-Holstein. (My maternal grandmother was also of German heritage, but born in the US.) Although my grandfather came from a village near Kiel on the Baltic Sea, and Claus Rohwedder came from a region on the North Sea, they both came to the United States from Schleswig-Holstein, as did many other German immigrants. The fact that both Otto Rohwedder and my mother grew up in Davenport, Iowa (at different times), but ended up living and working elsewhere in the US is another commonality.

Davenport and German Immigration
As it turns out, Davenport and the state of Iowa were a key destination for many German-speaking immigrants between 1850 and 1917. While there are obvious examples of Iowa communities and counties with Germanic names (Berne, Hamburg, Hanover, Holstein, Minden, New Vienna, and Westphalia), many towns with non-Germanic names also had a strong German connection, none more than Davenport. (Davenport was established in 1836 by Antoine LeClaire and named after his good friend Colonel George Davenport.) Iowa also supported many German-language newspapers, including Davenport’s Täglicher Demokrat (“Daily Democrat”), published from 1851 until 1918. By 1858 more than one-fifth of Davenport’s nearly 11,000 residents were Germans.

Rohwedder and His Bread-Slicing Machine
After Otto Rohwedder graduated from high school in Davenport, he had varied studies, finally earning a college degree in optics in Chicago in 1900. But instead of becoming an optometrist, Rohwedder pursued a career in jewelry, eventually owning three jewelry stores in St. Joseph, Missouri. He met and married Carrie Sophie Johnson in 1905. But in 1916 he sold his three stores and moved back to Davenport. He had an idea for a new invention and used the money from the sale to finance the development of his new bread-slicing machine.

Rohwedder made good progress on his new device, but in 1917 a fire at the Illinois factory where his bread slicer was to be produced destroyed a prototype slicer and the design blueprints. This setback meant that it would be another ten years before a new and improved machine was ready for sale. In 1927 he applied for a patent for a slicing machine that also wrapped each sliced loaf. The patent was granted in 1932.

A newspaper ad for pre-sliced “Wonder Cut” bread. This may have been the precursor of the Wonder Bread brand that began in 1930. PHOTO: Public domain

In 1928 the first machine was sold to a friend, baker, and sole investor named Frank Bench, who installed it at the Chillicothe Baking Company, in Chillicothe, Missouri. The first loaf of sliced bread, branded as Kleen Maid Sliced Bread, was sold commercially in Chillicothe on July 7, 1928. Sales of the bread slicer soon grew. Only five years later 80 percent of bread sold in the US was pre-sliced. The first mass-produced sliced bread in the US was Wonder Bread in 1930.

Forgotten History
The history of Rohwedder’s invention had been lost and forgotten in Missouri for about 75 years when Catherine Stortz Ripley — then the editor for The Chillicothe Constitution Tribune – began researching the city’s history. She discovered a short newspaper article describing the sale of the first ready-sliced bread by the Chillicothe Baking Company in 1928. Despite some skepticism, she wrote a blurb about it for the newspaper and later included the story in a book on local history in 2001.

But it wasn’t until 2003, when the Kansas City Star took interest in the story and interviewed Ripley for an article titled “At 75, Sliced Bread Deserves A Birthday Toast”, that the history became widely known. That was the spark that brought more attention to the sliced bread story, especially after the Associated Press shared it around the world. That in turn brought a deluge of inquiries from around the globe asking Ripley for more details, forcing her to seek more information.

She was lucky enough to find then-88-year-old Richard O. Rohwedder (1915-2007), Otto’s son, who was living in Arkansas and had kept a scrapbook full of original items that told his father’s story. Richard had actually been in Chillicothe on the day in 1928 when the Chillicothe Baking Company made its first sales of sliced bread. He was an eyewitness to the historic event. He paid a visit to Chillicothe and met with Ripley.

It wasn’t very long after the big story broke before the city of Chillicothe saw a good opportunity to market itself. The city officially designated itself as the “Home of Sliced Bread”. In 2018 the state of Missouri designated July 7 as “Sliced Bread Day”. Today a historical marker stands next to the building that once housed the Chillicothe Baking Company.

No Big Fortunes Were Made
Despite the great success of Otto Rohwedder’s machine, neither he nor Frank Bench got rich from their revolutionary device. The very next year, in October 1929, the Great Depression began. Bench lost his Chillicothe bakery, and Rohwedder was forced to sell the rights to his invention to the Micro Westco Company in Bettendorf, Iowa. He served as vice-president and sales manager for their Rohwedder Bakery Machine Division, which they were kind enough to name after him.

Today the Smithsonian Museum has Rohwedder’s second bread slicer on display. The first one fell apart after six months of use, and Rohwedder made various improvements that made the machines more robust and improved the quality of the sliced loaves.

As a sign of just how popular pre-sliced bread had become by the advent of the Second World War, a misguided 1943 government ban on the sale of sliced bread (to save steel and reduce bread prices) proved so unpopular, it was soon lifted. A headline in the New York Times read: “Sliced Bread Put Back on Sale; Housewives’ Thumbs Safe Again.”

Otto Frederick Rohwedder, the “father of sliced bread”, retired to Albion, Michigan in 1951 with his wife Carrie, where their daughter Margaret Steinhauer (1908-2004), and Otto’s sister Elizabeth Pickerill lived. He died in Concord, Michigan on November 8, 1960 at the age of 80. His grave, shared with his wife (d. 1955), lies in the Riverside Cemetery in Albion.

– HF