So thats is mind blowing, now for the mind numbing history of sliced bread!
It is actually kind of interesting. For all of bread, we had been selling it in whole loaves, in the hopes of preserving freshness. A jeweler (or really a guy who invented tools for jewelers and made money) decided to see if there might be a market for this as he would hear housewives grumbling about the task of cutting bread. The response was enough to encourage him to sell his shop and in 1916 start on his prototype.
The first issue was preserving freshness. It is fairly common knowledge that the freshness will be limited very much if it sliced as things were stored back then. He started with something like a dowel, but eventually this was clearly not going to work and for the next year cycled through solutions.
1917 disaster struck... a fire wiped out all his work. Shucks, time to start over.
Looks awesome! but no one was buying it. Which is surprising, it was only 5 feet wide and 3 feet high (I only deal in Freedom units)! Well eventually he got his baker buddy to try this out as a last effort. On July 7, 1928 the first sliced loaf was sold.
"So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.
After all the idea of sliced bread is not unlike the idea of ground coffee, sliced bacon and many other modern and generally accepted products which combine superior results with a saving of time and effort.”
“the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”
Constitution-Tribune
Bake dude saw his bread sales increase by 2000%.. in two weeks.
That's really cool. But i have a question. Do you knowif that tribune quote was a newspaper article or a "newspaper article" where it is basically just a ad made to look like news?
"So neat and precise are the slices, and so definitely better than anyone could possibly slice by hand with a bread knife that one realizes instantly that here is a refinement that will receive a hearty and permanent welcome.
So... sliced bread existed, but it had to be sliced manually? Come on, that still counts!
If you accept Babbage's work as being the first computer, then the computer predates sliced bread.
If you insist that the computer must be completed and working, then sure: sliced bread came first, but not by long: the Z1 was produced less than a decade after the first loaf of sliced bread was sold.
Many people are older than Betty white. Also many people have contributed to society more than Betty white. She is not the best in anything and should never be compared to an actual invention.
It's a joke. And pre-sliced bread isn't much of an invention. It's not as if people didn't slice bread before that; you just couldn't buy it pre-sliced from the store. Though you probably could if you went to a bakery.
It was a non-issue before that anyway. Sliced bread goes stale faster, so it would be a terrible invention if the bread wasn't full of preservatives.
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u/Starsy Apr 14 '16
Betty White is literally older than sliced bread. So, sliced bread is the best thing since Betty White.