The so-called father of sliced bread realised around 1912 that if he was to develop a successful machine for automatically slicing bread it would need to prevent the bread from going stale. His initial prototype designs held the bread firmly together with metal pins and was unsuccessful. In 1927 he designed a machine that not only sliced the bread but also wrapped it. The first machine was installed at the Chillicothe Baking Company, in Chillicothe, Missouri in 1928 and the first loaf of sliced bread was sold on July 7, 1928.