Loaves of bread were sold unsliced until 1928, when a guy named Otto Rohwedder figured out how to slice bread without crushing it. Rohwedder then wrapped the br

Loaves of bread were sold unsliced until 1928, when a guy named Otto Rohwedder figured out how to slice bread without crushing it. Rohwedder then wrapped the bread and inserted U-shaped pins on both sides of the loaf to make it look similar to an unsliced loaf. Sliced bread became a hit because you no longer had to worry about cutting pieces of similar thickness when you made a sandwich. That's where the expression "the best thing since sliced bread" comes from. Obviously, people had been slicing loaves of bread for ages, but pre-sliced bread really is a relatively recent business innovation. The NYT magazine had a page about this in this week's issue.[1] Also, here is a Google ngram of the phrase "since sliced bread". You can see that the saying started in the 1950s. [2] [1]http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-sliced-bread.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/magazine/who-made-that-sli... [2]http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+bread&year_start=1900&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share= http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=since+sliced+br...