On July 7, 1928, Chillicothe baker Frank Bench and inventor Otto Rohwedder brought sliced bread to Chillicothe, Missouri, when their bread slicing machine produced the first loaves of sliced bread and made them available in Chillicothe grocery stores. The machine quickly changed the way consumers bought bread and increased the bakery's sales by 2000 percent in 2 weeks. Before this invention, bread had to be sliced by hand in home kitchens. The device, approximately five feet long and four feet high, was invented by Iowa native O. F. Rohwedder and had been rejected by many bakers before Frank Bench accepted it. The original machine used at Chillicothe Baking Company eventually fell apart, but Rohwedder's second machine became part of the permanent collection of the Smithsonian Institute. The building at the corner of First and Elm Streets was the original home of the bread slicing machine.
