PRPG:

Ask Uncle John Anything: The Greatest Thing Since the Greatest Thing

August 26, 2014

Uncle John knows pretty much everything—and if he doesn’t, he heads his massive research library, or puts one of his many associates on the case. So go ahead: In the comments below, ask Uncle John anything. (And if we answer your question sometime, we’ll send you a free book!)

Before the invention of sliced bread, what did people say was “the best thing ever”?

Greatest Sliced BreadA couple of weeks ago, we looked at the origin of the phrase “it’s not rocket science,” and how people kind-of, sort-of called somebody an idiot for struggling with a problem in the decades before the rocket age. This idea of “the saying before the saying” intrigued us here at BRI headquarters, and we naturally gravitated, as we often do, toward the baked goods. If people wanted to say something was “the greatest thing since sliced bread,” what did they say…if they happened to live in a time before the dawn of sliced bread?

Sliced bread has been around since bread, of course, but pre-sliced bread wasn’t sold commercially in the United States until 1928. What took people so long to figure out how to slice bread? They needed a viable, commercial bread-slicing machine that could cut bread into uniform slices quickly and efficiently. Iowa inventor Otto Rohwedder built a prototype in 1912, but it was destroyed in a fire, and it wasn’t until 1928 when he had another one ready to go, which he sold to the Chillicothe Baking Company in Missouri. In July of that year, the company began selling Kleen Maid Sliced Bread, and it was a hit. It’s often difficult to market a new product, or a “new and improved” product to the skeptical public. So in its advertising materials, Chillicothe Baking proclaimed that their new Kleen Maid Sliced Bread was “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.”

So there you go: something might be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but sliced bread was the greatest thing since wrapped bread.