…About to make the most out of a toaster. Punky’s Dilemma, Paul Simon
My great-grandfather built a cottage in Iowa on the shores of Lake Okoboji in 1910. By the 1950s, when I began spending one month a year there, the cottage was old—it even smelled old. My parents and grandparents had lived through the Depression and acquired a saver’s habit: nothing could be thrown away or replaced.
We had a smoky Electrolux vacuum cleaner, old blue Fiestaware plates chipped in places, electrical wire sheathed in crumbling cotton insulation, and water from a hand pump in the yard.
It all seemed normal to me, except for the toaster. We kept an old toaster on the dining table. It was the old-fashioned kind—no timer and no heat detector. Whoever sat closest to the toaster was the toast master. It was your job to monitor the toasting process, flick the ejection button at the right time to produce perfect toast for everyone else.
However, burnt toast was the norm. My oldest brother would make you eat it anyway. I ate so much burnt toast that over the years I began to like it.
We read the Des Moines Register at breakfast. I followed the baseball scores while I ate my burnt Wonder Bread toast. The Wonder Bread wrapper had dozens of colored circles in cheerful primary colors. The founder of Wonder Bread was inspired by a hot air balloon tournament at the Indianapolis Speedway. By the 1960s, the Wonder Bread slogan was "helps build strong bodies 12 ways,” this was up from the “helps build strong bodies 8 ways” in the 1950s.
Wonder-Cut Bread was first put on the market in 1921. The snow-white color and the soft, smooth texture made the bread seem cleaner than other breads. Bleached-white, and sugar-heavy, it was stripped of nutrients until the Congressional flour hearings of 1940 forced Continental Bakery to restore nutrients—or as Continental described it: “enrichment.”
However, it only became a national sensation in 1930 when Continental Bakery adopted bread slicing machines.
Continental Bakery did not invent the bread slicing machine. Otto Frederick Rohwedder began work on his invention in 1912. Born in Des Moines, Rohwedder went to public schools in Davenport, Iowa, and studied ophthalmology and otology in Chicago. He married in 1905 and moved to St. Joseph, Missouri where he opened three jewelry stores. He got the idea for a bread slicing machine and in 1912 he sold his stores and began working on his idea.
There is no record of the source of his idea. In fact, all his blueprints and a prototype were destroyed in a 1917 factory fire in Monmouth, Illinois. Rohwedder tried to restore his invention from memory. It was ten years until the first loaf of sliced bread was sold by the Chillicothe Bakery on July 7, 1928, using a ten-foot long, “power-driven, multi-bladed” machine. After “considerable research,” Rohwedder determined the ideal thickness for each slice: slightly less than half an inch.
The Chillicothe, Missouri Constitution-Tribune hailed the arrival of sliced bread:
… a thrill of pleasure when [one] first sees a loaf of this bread with each slice the exact counterpart of its fellows. 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.
Bread sales increased by 2000% in Chillicothe in just the first two weeks. Rohwedder’s machine was in demand with 230 orders received from all over the nation in the first year. Wonder Bread entered the sliced bread market in 1930 and by 1933 80% of the bread sold in American was sliced.
During the time Rohwedder was perfecting his bread slicing machine, another Iowan, Charles Perkins Strite, was working on the first automatic pop-up toaster in Stillwater, Minnesota. He had grown frustrated by receiving burnt toast at the factory cafeteria where he worked.
Toast has been a culinary pleasure for centuries. The Romans adopted toast in 500 BCE from Egypt. Romans called it “tostum,” meaning to “burn or scorch.” Heating the bread triggers the Maillard reaction causing sugars and amino acids to change the color, taste, aroma, and water content of the bread. Toast was made with forks or small grills to hold the bread over the fire, like marshmallows at a Girl Scout cook out.
The first electric toaster depended on the 1905 invention of Nichrome (a combination of nickel and chromium) for the heating element. General Electric introduced the first electric toaster in 1909. The bread had to be flipped because it cooked only one side at a time. Toasters were built in odd configurations: little pyramids, vertical sliding drawers, space heaters with towers or crowned with coils.
Strite began work on his toaster in 1919. At first, he sold toasters to restaurants, hotels, and coffee shops. By 1926, he was selling a household toaster, the Toastmaster 1-A-1, a moniker worthy of NASA. The Toastmaster 1-A-1 was a true toaster improvement: you could roast both sides at the same time and it had an adjustable timer that released the catch on a spring. The toast would pop-up. Like a child’s jack-in-the-box, the pop-up toaster was hard to resist. As one newspaper ad proclaimed:
Your eyes will pop out when the toast pops up. Such toast!
With mounting acclaim, the electric toaster was a hit. March 1927 was declared “National Toaster Month.” Toaster manufacturers collaborated with local electric power companies to launch an advertising campaign to sell electric toasters. The ads ran from Paducah, Kentucky to Holyoke, Massachusetts to Emporia, Kansas. In Tipton, Oklahoma, the ad read:
Crisp, delicious, satisfying, this simplest of foods becomes the most delectable of viands when properly prepared on a properly-designed electric toaster.
Toaster sales reached 1.2 million units in 1930, at the same time that sliced bread sales surged. The combination of pop-up toaster and uniformly sized bread hit the spot. As an ad in Saturday Evening Post said:
This amazing new invention makes perfect toast every time! Without watching! Without turning! Without burning!"
People were urged to have a toaster in every bedroom. It was a revolution in breakfast: sliced bread and the pop-up toaster. Was it the greatest turning point in American history?
In its first newspaper ad in 1927, the Chillicothe Bakery seemed to sense the drama:
Announcing: The Greatest Forward Step in the Baking Industry Since Bread was Wrapped -- Sliced Kleen Maid Bread.
Sliced bread became the innovation standard among bakers. The Walsh Baking Company’s ad for Golden Toast Thick and Thin was published in The Evansville Press (Evansville, Indiana) in December 1933:
We’ve merely added the first improvement since sliced bread . . . thick and thin slices in the same loaf.
In 1934 in the Tampa Bay Times, Bell Bakeries began putting freshness dates on the bread wrapper. The general manager said:
This is the most progressive step that has been taken in the baking industry since sliced bread was introduced.
Ruger’s Bakery advertised in the Lafayette Journal and Courier (Lafayette, Indiana) in 1939 hailing its new Pantry Package Twin Style White Bread as:
THE NEWEST THING Since SLICED BREAD
It took another 12 years before sliced bread was recognized outside of the bread world as the zenith of American ingenuity.
In 1951, Dorothy Kilgallen, writing in the New York Journal-American, described movie heart throb, Stewart Granger, as “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” In 1956, 1,752 bobbysoxers marched in San Diego at the opening of Elvis Pressley’s first movie. They carried handmade signs including:
Elvis Pressley: the greatest thing since sliced bread
The phrase itself now seems as common as raw toast. But we have much more to learn from sliced bread and pop-up toasters. Speaking in 1930 to the New South Baker, a bakery trade journal, Rohwedder outlined his faith in sliced bread:
We are continuing our experimental and developmental work confident in the belief that the real possibilities of Sliced Bread have scarcely been scratched.
Even today the faithful soldier on, the keepers of the flame. In Chillicothe, you can visit the Sliced Bread Innovation Center where you can see the building where “it all began.” Spend a day or a couple of minutes, but you will surely want to join the “Friends of Sliced Bread.”
My friend, former State Rep. Smitty Pignatelli, used to ask, “what was the greatest thing before sliced bread?” We all seek answers, but sadly there are some questions that are destined to remain shrouded in dusty mystery.
