What Came First, Sliced Bread Or The Pop-Up Toaster?

Have you ever considered how recent, relatively speaking, the invention of sliced bread was? It used to be the case that, when you bought a loaf of bread from the bakery or the market, you had to slice it yourself as needed. (Any way you slice it though, there are some places you don't want to store bread.) This only changed when an Iowa jeweler named Otto Rohwedder introduced the bread slicing machine in 1928. (It would have been earlier, but a fire in 1917 destroyed Rohwedder's blueprints and he had to start over.) That means Dick Van Dyke, for instance, is older than sliced bread. For that matter, so is the pop-up toaster.

That makes sense, logically. After all, a toaster works just as well on bread you cut yourself as it does on pre-sliced bread. But it's still an odd little fact. Who would have thought a whimsical machine that sends your toast jumping joyfully into the air would come before a machine with automatic blades? (Or that the next successor for toasting bread might be the air fryer?)

Electric toasters have been around since the 1890s, but early models were slow, fussy, and unreliable. You had to toast one side of a bread slice at a time, and the fine line between "toasted" and "burnt" could be crossed in a matter of seconds. That meant you had to hover over the machine to make sure it didn't burn your toast, which kind of defeated the purpose of having a convenient bread toasting device in the first place.

Charles Strite worked at a manufacturing plant outside his home city of Minneapolis, and he was sick of the cafeteria serving him burnt toast all the time. In 1919, he set about designing a better toaster. Two years later, he had a patent for something called the Toastmaster. Not only could it toast both sides of a slice, after a certain length of time the heat would turn off and a spring would eject the bread from the machine, just to make extra sure that it didn't toast for longer than necessary. They caught on very quickly in commercial kitchens, and a home version soon followed (though some will still argue you don't need a toaster). Remarkably, the toasters of today work more or less exactly the same way as the Toastmaster once did. Talk about nailing it!