The television was invented only two years after the invention of sliced bread.

The television was invented only two years after the invention of sliced bread.

1928

On this day, July 7, in 1928, a bakery in Chillicothe, Mo., was the first to sell pre-cut bread using Otto Frederick Rohwedder's invention: the automatic bread-slicing machine. While an advertisement touted it as “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped,” customers

 

Sliced bread was first sold in 1921 under the name Wonder Bread and the adverts for this new product said it was “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped”. People thought this was funny so they began to use the phrase “the best since sliced bread” to mean something that is really good.

It was only with the convergence of automated baking processes that could produce loaves of uniform size and plastic packaging that could prevent bread from going stale quickly if sliced, and reinforced by other inventions (like toasters) that required slices of uniform size, that it was economically feasible to pre-

Sept. 7, 1927

Electronic television was first successfully demonstrated in San Francisco on Sept. 7, 1927. The system was designed by Philo Taylor Farnsworth, a 21-year-old inventor who had lived in a house without electricity until he was 14.

During 1943, U.S. officials imposed a short-lived ban on sliced bread as a wartime conservation measure. The ban was ordered by Claude R. ... I should like to let you know how important sliced bread is to the morale and saneness of a household. My husband and four children are all in a rush during and after breakfast.

The advertisement read: “The greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” This is believed to be the origin of the far better-known saying we know today, 'the best thing since sliced bread', but also suggests that before sliced bread, the 'best thing' was in fact wrapped bread.