July 7: The greatest thing since bread
On July 7, 1928, sliced bread was sold for the first time in Chillicothe, Missouri. Tonight's film: Sleeper (1973).
Do you remember what mornings were like before bread came pre-sliced in the bag? I don’t, not really. For me, bread was always there in even slices, ready for the toaster. But there was one morning, exactly on July 7, 1928, when a bakery in Missouri sold the first loaf like that, and after that everything was different.
The idea came from a jeweler. Otto Rohwedder was born in Iowa on July 7, 1880, and ran three jewelry stores in St. Joseph, Missouri. But bread is what obsessed him: how could a machine slice it evenly and wrap it so it stayed fresh at the same time? He sold all three stores to fund the machine. Then, in 1917, a fire broke out at his factory and burned his prototype along with the blueprints. It took him years to raise the money again.
In 1927 he finally built a machine that not only sliced the bread but wrapped it too. He sold the first one to a friend, the baker Frank Bench, who installed it at his bakery in Chillicothe. The first loaf went on sale on July 7, 1928, under the brand name Kleen Maid. The newspaper ad of the day called it “the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped.” By 1933, American bakeries were turning out more sliced loaves than unsliced ones. Rohwedder’s original machine now sits in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
And here comes the film, because the phrase “the greatest thing since sliced bread” means something that changes everything, after which you cannot live the old way. That is exactly what Sleeper (1973), Woody Allen’s film, is about, only its characters move in the opposite direction.
Allen plays Miles Monroe, the owner of a health-food shop called the Happy Carrot, who in 1973 is put into a cryogenic chamber and woken two hundred years later, in 2173. The future he drops into is thick with machines: a totalitarian police state run by a leader who is now just a nose on a tube, and where an Orgasmatron cabinet does what the name does not quite give away. Miles is an ordinary, ill-at-ease guy trying to save his favorite organ (the brain), while the rebels and the authorities both want to use him. Diane Keaton plays Luna Schlosser, who starts as an obedient citizen and slowly becomes more of a person under Miles’s influence.
The film is funny, though, honestly, some of the jokes have gathered rust by now. It runs 88 minutes on a 2 million dollar budget, distributed by United Artists. Allen co-wrote it with Marshall Brickman and plays the saxophone himself on the jazz cues. The humor is slapstick in the Marx Brothers mold: pie-fights, bad disguises, fast talk. If you like the early, still-cheerful Woody Allen, this one will land. If what you want is the kind of sci-fi that takes the future seriously, give it a pass.
It is dear to me because I see in it the same doubleness I find in myself. I love technology, comfort, the machines that make life easier. As a software developer I spent my whole life building such things. But I also know that every invention like this, sliced bread included, takes something from you at the same time. A little skill. A little time. A little patience that you used to spend slicing the loaf yourself. Miles Monroe sleeps for two hundred years and wakes up in a world where even rebellion has been mechanized. Well, that is why we are here.
Tonight, press play.
What else could have been tonight
July 7, 1937. The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, Starship Troopers (1997)
On July 7, 1937, a three-day clash began between Japanese and Chinese troops at the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugou Bridge in Chinese), near Beijing. The Japanese said one of their soldiers had gone missing during a night exercise and demanded to enter the walled town of Wanping to search for him. That small incident grew into the Second Sino-Japanese War, which ran until 1945. A local dispute turned into a global war.
This is where Starship Troopers (1997), Paul Verhoeven’s film, fits in. Earth declares war on the Bugs, an insectoid alien species, after an asteroid strike wipes out Buenos Aires. A local provocation escalates into a total war between species, just like the one at the bridge. The film also openly mocks militarism and war propaganda, so it stays uncomfortably current today.
July 7, 2003. The launch of Opportunity, Red Planet (2000)
On July 7, 2003, NASA launched the Opportunity rover on a Delta II rocket. The mission was planned for 90 Martian days, about 92 Earth days, and was meant to drive less than 1 kilometer. Instead Opportunity worked for nearly 15 years: 5,111 Martian days, and roughly 45 kilometers across the red planet. It was declared dead on February 13, 2019, after a planet-wide dust storm cut the sunlight from its solar panels. Many people translated its last signal as “my battery is low and it’s getting dark.”
Red Planet (2000) is a different kind of Mars story: a crewed expedition that arrives around 2050 and finds the planet hostile beyond any expectation. Val Kilmer and Carrie-Anne Moss lead the cast. It is no masterpiece, but it is good fun, and it is interesting to compare it with the real story of Opportunity: the robot nobody expected much from ended up doing more than an entire cinematic expedition.
Sources
Main event, sliced bread:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Frederick_Rohwedder (Rohwedder’s biography, the 1917 fire, first sale on July 7, 1928, the Smithsonian machine)
https://www.thehomeofslicedbread.com/about (the story of the Chillicothe Baking Company and Frank Bench)
https://moneyweek.com/328697/7-july-1928-sliced-bread-goes-on-sale-for-the-first-time (the contemporary “greatest forward step” slogan, the 1933 milestone)
Film, Sleeper:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeper_(1973_film) (2 million dollar budget, 88 minutes, United Artists, Rollins-Joffe Productions)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070707/ (Miles Monroe, Luna Schlosser, the 2173 setting)
Side events:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marco_Polo_Bridge_incident (July 7, 1937, the three-day battle, Wanping and the missing soldier)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War (the war that ran until 1945)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120201/ (Starship Troopers, 1997)
https://science.nasa.gov/mission/mer-opportunity/ (launch on July 7, 2003, 15 years, 5,111 Martian days)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/science/2019/02/13/opportunity-nasas-record-setting-mars-rover-is-declared-dead-after-years/ (declared dead on February 13, 2019, the dust storm)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0199753/ (Red Planet, 2000)