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.”

Christian Nelson Inventor of the I-Scream Bar

Christian Nelson

I once read that the best inventions come from an everyday moment of indecision. Christian Nelson saw one of those moments in his candy and ice-cream shop in Onawa, Iowa. A boy walked in, stared at a chocolate bar, then at an ice-cream cone, and said, “I want ’em both, but I only got a nickel.” Nelson thought, why not both?

He was a high-school teacher who ran a candy-shop in the summer to make ends meet. He could’ve stayed in his classroom, and never tinkered with confectionery physics, but he went home and experimented with melted chocolate and frozen vanilla ice-cream blocks. How to coat ice-cream in chocolate so the chocolate would stick, wouldn’t crack, wouldn’t slide off, wouldn’t melt in your fingers before you could enjoy it? He discovered that adding cocoa butter made the difference. He built a dipping machine, produced 500 sample bars, and handed them out at a fireman’s picnic.

He called his creation the “I-Scream Bar.” Then he found a partner, Russell C. Stover, who helped turn it from a summer side-project into something national. They renamed it “Eskimo Pie.” Before long, millions of people were being eaten. Nelson’s invention turned into a nationwide treat.

Glenn L. Martin - He Put America in the Air

Glenn L. Martin in his biplane, 1911

Out in Macksburg, Iowa, the wind has an attitude. It never really stops; it just slides across the fields, looking for something to push around. It found Glenn L. Martin in the 1880s—a skinny kid with quiet eyes and a mind that hummed louder than the weather.

The Martins didn’t spend much time in Iowa. They headed south to Kansas, where the land stretched flat and the wind came in wide, hard, and honest. Glenn liked it that way. The wind was a teacher. It made things move. It refused to quit.

He started small—building kites in the kitchen. He sold them for a quarter each, which was exactly what it cost to make another one. His mother, Minta, stitched the sails while he made a mess of her flour bin. “She thought I was curious,” he said later. “Not crazy.”

He was already both.

Lee de Forest The Man Who Gave Volume to the World

Lee de Forest broadcasting Columbia phonograph record in 1916.

Lee de Forest came howling out of Council Bluffs, Iowa, in 1873 — a preacher’s kid born into cornfields and sermons. The man was supposed to save souls, not invent chaos. But Iowa does strange things to dreamers. Too much sky, too much silence. You start thinking the air is alive, that maybe you could send a message through it. De Forest tried.

He didn’t stay long in Iowa — he was a “short timer” there — but the flat land, the quiet nights, and the sense that sound could cross a county line haunted him. When he got to Yale, he shorted out the campus power system during an experiment and nearly got expelled for tinkering with the lighting. That was his style: break it, then figure out how to put it back together.

In 1906 he built a little glass bulb called the Audion — three wires, a filament, a grid — a crude amplifier. Feed it a whisper of current, and it would roar. At first, folks scoffed. A New York paper snarked that de Forest was “wasting his time on mystical dreams of speaking tubes.” A skeptical editorial in the Scientific American suggested he “might as well claim to hold lightning in his pocket.” But that bulb cracked open the world anyway. Radios, telephones, movies — they all trace back to that flicker of electricity in his lab.