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A toast to innovation
Prior to the invention of sliced bread, there was just bread. For thousands of years, dating back to the Stone Age, bread has been on the menu. I have thought a lot about bread. Who thought to mill grains into flour, mix the flour with water, salt, and a leavening agent, then knead it and bake it? A genius, that's who! Then, when Otto Frederick Rohwedder invented a bread slicing machine, commercially produced sliced bread was born. That was in 1928—not even a century ago! Sliced bread was such an amazing invention that to this day, we use it as a baseline to compare other innovations. We refer to new marvels of science and technology as “the greatest thing since sliced bread.” Car radios, Scotch tape, electron microscopes, bullet-proof vests, pocket calculators, Velcro, cassette tape, personal computers, mobile phones, air-conditioning, television, caller ID, the World Wide Web, and so much more. They are all the greatest things since sliced bread. It is said that “necessity is the mother of invention” and surely, some of these innovations resulted from a simple problem that needed to be solved. I imagine, for example, that someone didn’t want to get up from the couch to change the channel, thus giving the world the TV remote. Throughout humanity, resourcefulness and creativity have fueled innovation, sometimes solving problems we didn’t even know we had. Here’s one more interesting factoid: the pop-up toaster preceded prepackaged sliced bread by about seven years. I can just see Otto’s mind working a mile a minute as he thought how great it would be to have uniformly sliced bread so everyone could more easily enjoy what is perhaps the greatest of all inventions, buttered toast. Thank you, Otto Frederick Rohwedder. Signed, Breakfast Lovers Everywhere.
Stay safe and healthy,
Tracy Jacobs
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