Timeline Otto Frederick Rohwedder

Otto Frederick Rohwedder 13

• 1900 Rohwedder qualifies in optics At what is now the Northern Illinois College of Ophthalmology He had already apprenticed to a jeweller. The optics degree paid for the jewellery shops.
• 1905 Rohwedder marries Carrie Johnson They settled in St Joseph, Missouri A marriage of fifty years, through the bankruptcy and the fire and the eventual success.
• 1912 Rohwedder sells three jewellery shops to build a bread slicer Customers had complained about uneven hand-cut slices Everyone told him sliced bread would go stale. He spent sixteen years proving otherwise.
• 1917 A factory fire destroys the prototype and the blueprints Everything he had built in five years, gone He was wiped out, took work as an investment agent, and started again from nothing.
• 1927 A machine that slices and wraps The wrapping was the part that solved the staleness objection The pop-up toaster had just reached American kitchens, which gave sliced bread a reason to exist.
• 1928 The first loaf of sliced bread is sold Chillicothe Baking Company, Missouri - Kleen Maid Sliced Bread On Rohwedder's 48th birthday. Bakery sales rose 2,000 per cent within two weeks.
• 1928 The patent is filed Machine for Slicing an Entire Loaf of Bread at a Single Operation Proving novelty was difficult after the fire destroyed the evidence of his earlier work.
• 1930 Wonder Bread goes sliced Continental Baking takes the idea national The first national brand to sell pre-sliced, and the point at which it stopped being a novelty.
• 1932 US Patent 1,867,377 is granted Four years after the first commercial loaf By then the machines were already in bakeries across the country.
• 1933 Eighty per cent of American bread is sold pre-sliced Five years after Chillicothe One of the fastest adoptions of any consumer technology of the century.
• 1943 Sliced bread is banned A wartime measure to save wax paper and steel The public complained so loudly that the ban was lifted after 47 days.
• 1951 The greatest thing since sliced bread Red Skelton says television is the greatest invention since sliced bread The phrase came from Chillicothe's own 1928 advertising, and became the standard measure of innovation.
• 1960 Otto Frederick Rohwedder dies Aged 80, at Concord, Michigan He sold the patent rights and never became rich from the most quoted invention in the language.