Otto Rohwedder The Man Who Invented Sliced Bread

Otto Rohwedder spent over two decades perfecting
the invention that made sliced bread possible

Otto Rohwedder was a jeweler from Davenport, Iowa. His world was tiny gears, watch springs, precision tools. Then he walked into a bakery long enough to see the problem. Bread was sold whole, hacked into slices at home, crumbly and uneven. He thought, “There ought to be a better way.” Something mechanical that could do the job once and do it perfectly.

Around 1912, he sold his jewelry business to bankroll it, a decision most people called insane. “Bread can’t be sliced by machine,” bakers told him. “It’ll go stale before you can sell it.” Rohwedder didn’t argue. He built it anyway. His wife, Carrie, said, “He wasn’t the kind to quit when he got told no.”

He worked in a basement filled with bread crumbs and cutting tools. He measured loaf dimensions with calipers, built frames of steel, gears that turned too fast, and blades that jammed on crusts. The loaves fell apart. He added holding pins. He invented a mechanism that would slice and then clamp the bread back together until it could be wrapped. “A sliced loaf is like a family,” he said. “It needs to be held together, or it falls apart.”

In 1917, his workshop burned to the ground — everything was as gone—prototypes, drawings, tools. All that survived was the idea. “It nearly broke me,” he said. “But once you’ve seen it work, even for a second, you can’t stop.” He rebuilt from memory. He pawned his tools and borrowed money from friends who thought they were paying for his retirement, not another experiment.

A decade later, he had something that worked — a slicing machine that wrapped each loaf in a wax paper before the air could ruin it. It wasn’t beautiful, but it worked. He hauled it around to bakers like a traveling preacher, handing out slices. Most laughed him off. One called it “a fool’s machine.” But he found one taker: Frank Bench of the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. Bench told him, “We’ll give it a try. If it works, we’ll both get rich. If it doesn’t, at least we’ll have sandwiches.”

On July 7, 1928, the first pre-sliced, wrapped loaves went on sale. Kleen Maid Sliced Bread. People stared. Some thought it was sorcery. Within weeks, sales doubled. Housewives told newspapers they’d “never go back.” One local editor called it “the greatest forward step in baking since bread was wrapped.”

The machine itself was a mechanical symphony — a conveyor belt pulling a loaf through twelve vertical blades, slicing clean, then pushing the loaf through a wrapping arm that sealed it tight. The motion was hypnotic. “It’s not the slicing that’s hard,” said Rohwedder. “It’s keeping it alive afterward.”

It wasn’t perfect. The first machine broke after six months. The blades dulled, motors burned out, and the wax paper jammed. Rohwedder kept fixing, tightening, and redesigning. He was part inventor, part repairman, part evangelist. When people doubted him, he’d pull out a slice and say, “Touch it. Still fresh.”

In 1930, the Continental Baking Company rolled out Wonder Bread using his machine, and sliced bread became a national standard. He had turned an act of domestic drudgery into an industrial process. “People don’t think about slicing bread anymore,” he said, “and that’s how you know it worked.”

In 1943, when the U.S. government briefly banned sliced bread to conserve materials, the public went berserk. One letter to the editor said, “I cannot understand how the government expects us to return to the Stone Age.” Two months later, the ban was lifted. Civilization was restored.

Rohwedder never made a fortune. He sold his patents and went to work for the company that built his slicers. He kept tinkering, improving the design, smoothing the motion. “You never finish,” he said. “You just stop when it’s good enough for somebody else.”