Tag Archives: Sliced Bread

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

“It’s the greatest invention since sliced bread.”

~Literally every single salesperson you have ever met, every goddamn one

 sliced bread

We take a lot of the simple things in our lives for granted. That’s just human nature—if something doesn’t look difficult, or inherently present itself as some technological triumph, we tend to assume that these have always existed.

We can marvel at the technology behind, say, a smart phone, but overlook the fact that the first calculator was made in 1959, looked like this, and was able to compute less than your smart phone’s calculator app.

We’re going about this in a roundabout way, but the moral here is that many assume sliced bread has been around since, oh, roughly the same time as bread and knives co-existed, when in reality it’s a 20th century phenomenon.

Yes, sliced bread was first packaged and sold in 1928, and it is an American invention. Specifically, by an enterprising Midwesterner who devoted over ten years of his life to designing and perfecting a machine to slice whole loaves of bread at once to ensure that we would forever be able to take an arduous step out of the process of making toast and sandwiches. That man, nay, that hero, was Otto Frederick Rohwedder, and this is his story.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder and the Invention of Sliced Bread

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A Road Trip of Roadside Attractions Through America’s Midwest: Part 3

“Daddy, mom said that we’re supposed to call the police if you start drinking behind the wheel again.”

~How many times does daddy have to tell you kids to shut the hell up?

America is a glorious, sprawling land, with a lot of weird shit out there.  As we’ve established in our first and second road trips through Midwestern America, the best part of driving through America is being able to stop and waste time at a whole variety of strange, exotic places.  Except for that spider-car.  That was terrifying as all shit.


After our last trip, which ended with several AFFotD staffers getting wasted at Mount Rushmore, we don’t really know what happened.  When we eventually woke up, we all were missing one shoe, one sock, and the sleeves of our shirts had been cut off.  Oh, also, our car was scattered around us in dozens of pieces.  Or so we thought.  Actually, our car was nowhere to be found.  Turns out we’re in Alliance, Nebraska, where we were greeted with this sight.

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