"The greatest thing since sliced bread"

You've heard this phrase before and probably have used it, but why? What's so great about sliced bread?

Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented the first bread slicing machine. the Chillicothe Baking Company used Rohwedder's machine commercially on July 7, 1928. They advertised their sliced bread as "the greatest step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped." 

The next step was to wrap the sliced bread. Gustav Papendick figured out that placing the sliced bread in a cardboard tray, the wrapping machines would be able to package the bread. 

Commercially sliced bread was thinner than when people sliced the bread themselves so they began to consume more bread. In 1943, sliced bread was banned because of the war. The loss of sliced bread distressed people. As one woman who wrote to the New York Times said: "I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household..."