Hey, and welcome to the short Stuff. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here sitting in for Dave. So this is an official bonafide short stuff.
That's right big thanks to History of Bread dot com, History dot com, oral prints at houstuffworks dot com, and the surprisingly instructive Goldmetal Bakery dot Com.
I also want to shout out Mental Flaws and Zachary Krockeatt on Pricenomics.
Great because this is about slice bread. That you've heard the term, of course, the best thing since slice bread. And oddly enough, well not oddly, but slice bread has been around less than one hundred years, even though bread has been around for tens of thousands of years.
Yeah, I think in either a bread episode or a beer episode, we explored whether or not bread was created to make beer portable, a beer starter portable. But regardless, it's been around for a very very long time. And yet would you say thirty thousand years?
I said tens of thousands, But yeah, that's a little more specific.
Okay, let's say bread was invented thirty thousand years ago. It took twenty nine nine hundred years before this point for somebody to think of pre sliced bread or if they thought of it to actually follow through with that idea. And we have a hero hero named Otto Frederick Rowedter to thank for that. We'll meet him in a minute.
Yeah. So, I mean you can listen to our bread episode. We don't need to go over all that, but suffice it to say, for twenty nine nine hundred years Ish people were generally tearing off chunks of bread. That's where we get the term breaking bread. There were sandwiches, I believe the first like credit for the real sandwich goes to Rabbi Helll the Elder who put lamb and bitter herbs on in between two pieces of matzo the hill
El sandwich. And then in eighteen forty woman miss Leslie Eliza Leslie published Directions for Cookery in which she talked about what's thought to believe be like the first ham sandwich, where she talks about cutting slices of bread very neatly. So people were slicing their bread at home. It's not like they were like, I want to make a sandwich, but I just tear it off in these big chunks. And I don't understand people were home slicing bread to
make sandwiches. But that all changed on July seventh, nineteen twenty eight.
Right, yeah, because that guy I mentioned before, Auto Frederick Roeder, the father of sliced bread. He had been tinkering with this for well over a decade, right Rove.
He was to be German.
It has to be. Well, his name is Auto Frederick first, I mean, those are your first two clues, and then they really trying to drive it home on the third.
Name then Alf Deutsch he.
No, he was, You're not gonna do it from what the road, Vetter.
I just want you to say it German.
Auto Friederic Throvetter, Yeah, there even't even though I could roll my rs, you're calling him row it Er. Well, I'm you know, from Georgia, in Ohio, in Florida. All right, all right, so anyway ot or OFR. I know it's that it's initials. I'm trying to think of something else to call him that you won't make fun of him
me for how about Auto? So Auto he was an inventor, and I don't I didn't see anywhere where he got the idea to do this, but just suddenly sat up one days, like sliced bread, we should make sliced bread so you can just go buy store buy at the store pre sliced bread. And he got to work making a machine all the way back in nineteen seventeen. But you mentioned it wasn't until nineteen twenty eight that people started being able to buy pre sliced bread at the store.
And that's because he got pretty far, got a prototype, developed, had all these blueprints for making this machine, and there was a fire at his office that just wiped everything out.
That's right. It's very sad, Yeah, and it took him a long time to get back up to speed. I do think we should point out that this guy was a jeweler. He was not in the food business at all. He had an ophthalmology degree. Yet he became a jeweler and had three jewelry stores that he owned. But he was an inventor and he would sell those jewelry stores and that's what financed his I guess, just strange idea to slice and package bread.
Yeah, And I mean think about how just normal that seems now, just to imagine that somebody had to have that idea at one point, and then we know the person who did. His name is Auto. I just find that fascinating. That's right, mister Rouiter, if you want to put it like that. Should we take a break?
Yes, all right, I'll be right back. Stuff U s.
So Auto had that fire in nineteen seventeen and he kept working at it, and eleven years later he had a working machine that was pumped by foot. I saw it like a sewing machine of the era, and it was two sets of very sharp blades, some going up, some going down at the same time, and a loaf of bread would come from a top down a ramp past the blades and come out the bottom of the
machine sliced, but kind of a mess. They were just kind of laying all over the place, and a loafish shape, but really a pretty messy loafish shape.
Yeah. They were half inch slices because he did a lot of research and came up with a half inches sort of like the perfect uniform with for a piece of bread, for a sandwich or whatever else you want to do with it, I guess, yeah. And he sold that first slicer to a guy named a friend of his name Frank Bench, who was a baker in Missoura at a place called the Chilicoke Baking Company, and that was the first one sold. The second was sold to another baker named Gustav Poppindick. And this is the guy
who improved it. He was like, hey, you got these slices that are coming out, but they're all falling apart. He came up with a way to slice it where they stayed you know, packaged together. They stayed fresher longer, and they just made the wrapping process much easier. So he improved upon it.
Yeah, for sure. So two things. Frank Bench was a baker on the verge of bankruptcy and just decided to take a chance and pay his friend for this machine. And number two, the before Gustav Poppindick came along. Auto's solution to these floppy, flimsy like falling apart loaves of bread was to stick a hatpin in them. And then part of the instruction was to take the hat pin out just far enough so that you could take some however many slices you wanted from it, and then push
the hat pin back in. And everybody's like, that's a terrible idea. What else you got, And luckily Papindick was like, no, no, no, we'll have it wrapped so that by the time it comes out of the slicer, this loaf isn't falling apart, and it's wrapped for freshness. It was a great, great improvement because without it, sliced bread would have gone nowhere.
Basically, Yeah, I wonder if Rovetda was like, have you seen a kincake? They got a freaking plastic baby in.
Those things, right, and you guys are you can deal with a hat pin, right, You're not going to choke on a hat pin. But eighteen people a year choke on a king cake baby.
It wouldn't surprise me, so the ref diference. The first reference to slice bread and print apparently was in nineteen twenty eight when that local paper from Frank Bench's bread company there in Missouri had an article that said slice bread is made here. That was the headline. I'm sorry, it was an advertisement. Slice bread is made here, and they are, of course the home of the original slice bread. They're in Missouri, which is quite a claim to fame,
I'm sure. But when this stuff came out, it wasn't like everyone was like, oh my god, this is the best thing since since whatever the previous best thing was. People are like, this is weird because they had been slicing their own bread. They didn't know what to think about it. They had to convince, you know, people to get on board, to get bakeries on board, and who got on board was generally homemakers, which at the time was largely women. These women who were packing lunches for
husbands and kids. They were like, this is incredible. You have no idea how much easier this is. And I don't have kids arguing about different sized slices, and Johnny's thing is bigger than me, and the sandwich looks janky because the bread slopes at the end. And I got a small piece and a big piece and it's made everything quicker and streamlined my routine, and this is the new best thing.
Right And to help them out, I think Wonderbread first came out. It was I think the first slice bread nationally available or widely available, and it became the most popular. And originally it was called wonder cut because it became pre sliced, and they shortened it to wonder bread. But I was like, seriously, how much of a timesaver is this? And then I read a quote from a woman who was upset. We'll talk about why she was upset in
a minute. But she makes a really good case that, like, if you're having to slap together sandwiches really quickly for your family's lunches before they go out the door, and you're also cutting bread to make toast for them at the same time, like you might have to slice thirty slices of bread really quick, right, and that's actually kind of time consuming. So if you can buy pre sliced bread, that's going to save you some time and effort, and
it actually is worth it. So I finally wrapped my head around how much of a timesaver slice bread actually is.
Yeah, I got six kids, I got a husband, I got a divorced neighbor who doesn't understand how to make a sandwich. Art, Yeah, arts force. He didn't know how to make a sandwich. Everyone wants toast, everyone wants sandwiches. You can't take this away from.
Us, No, And they tried to, didn't they.
Yeah, I mean I didn't the government step in and literally try to stop slice bread.
Yes, So, as part of the wartime conservation in the United States for World War Two, Claude R. Wickert, who was the US Food Administrator.
I think it's vickered.
Sorry, you're probably right, but I'm going to call him Claude Wickered. He ordered a bay on sliced bread in particular, not bread, not anything else, just sliced bread. And his reasoning was, you have to use thicker wax paper to keep pre sliced bread fresh because there's a lot of holes in it. Now there's a lot of extra service area to go stale, so that means you're using more paraffin.
And god knows what else they were trying to use paraffin for, probably water proofing stuff like clothing and things like that at the time. Yeah, so they needed the paraffin. And then at the same time, they're also like, the price of grain is about to go up, and we don't want bakers to be able to use sliced bread prices, which is more expensive to hide passing on higher grain prices. So we're just gonna say you can't have sliced bread.
And Claude Wicker walked away whistling and like dusting his hands off, and he thought that was it, and he ran into America's homemakers, who surged up like a tidal wave of angry people wearing aprons. It came out after him, and he ended up backing down pretty quick. Yeah.
He put on his canvas wax, his wax canvas field jacket.
Right, and he marched out of the room his veiled backet.
Thank you for getting on board. So back to Roevet. He sold his patent rights to a company called the micro Westow Company in Iowa. I think we didn't mention he was. I think he was from Iowa.
Right, Davenport.
Yeah, And he actually was one of those deals where you sell the patent rights, but then you come on board as a sort of spokesman and salesperson. So he led the Rovetta Bakery Machine division, selling these things to more and more bakeries. But he never became like some huge name. I think there are many, many more inventors of very common items that are much more well known. He lived a very quiet life in Louisiana, and I think he retired in seventy one and passed away at what close to.
Eighty His age was supposed to eighty, yeah, as opposed to what died nineteen eighty?
Oh, okay, I got you, Yeah, close to eighty.
I don't know what year it was, though, do you know I don't as a matter of fact, but we could kind of guess he lived. He was nineteen sixty. There it is, right there. I was going to do some matha. Luckily I was bailed out at the last minute. Yeah.
So there you have it with slice bread, right.
Yeah. Well there's one other thing. There's an extra happy end to this story. That guy Frank Bench, the nearly bankrupt baker who took a chance on his friend Auto and his new machine. His sales increased by two thousand percent when he started selling sliced bread and he was saved. Wow, yep, pretty cool.
That's amazing. I think it's pronounced big.
I hope, I really hope that Auto's like great grandson Tim rice In and he's like, it's row Weather.
Well it may have been since they were in Iowa. A lot of people, you know, change their very German or French or whatever pronounced names to more American sounding sure, like Clark, what was Clark?
Clark?
Bryant was probably O'Briant at some point.
No, Clark was Clark. It's a derivative of clerk. So I come from a long line of pencil pushers.
Well, how weirdly inappropriate I agree.
I'm glad you said that. Thank you. Yeah, well, I guess short Stuff's out.
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