It was a small cut for the Chillicothe Baking Company. But a giant leap for packed lunches all over the world.
Eighty years ago this Monday, the sliced bread machine made its first incision in Missouri, USA.
Not everyone was impressed. The Times noted derisively that: Before long bakers will probably butter the bread themselves and spread jam on it at need. For very tired customers they may even cut the bread into finger shapes.
And, of course, so they do.
But on the whole sliced bread gained instant acclaim.
Among its many triumphs? The fact that, eight decades later, no-one has yet definitively answered the following: What is the "best thing since sliced bread"?
Comment Central readers, it's up to you. In honour of the perfectly dissected loaf, we're launching a competition with news.com.au to discover the best British and Australian inventions since 1928.
We'll pick the top nominations, host a poll this Wednesday and announce the winner at the end of the week. This will involve some friendly rivalry with the Aussies. Their contenders include latex gloves, the Speedo and the dual flush toilet. Surely we can beat those?
For while we Brits can not take credit for the sliced loaf, we've had a few small crumbs of our own success. After all, our nation is responsible for Viagra (Kent, 1996) the zebra crossing (London, 1949), cat's eyes (Yorkshire, 1933) and a little thing called penicillin (London, 1928).
And that's not even mentioning the World Wide Web (Sir Tim Berners-Lee, 1990)...
So get nominating.
Today in Times Comment
And from the rest of the papers...
- Janet Daley: (The Telegraph) - A new Labour party may be bad for the Tories' health
- Jonathan Wynne-Jones: (The Telegraph) - Dr Rowan Williams stands tall in the Church
- Philip Johnston: (The Telegraph) - Fair trials impossible if fear rules the streets
- Leading Article: (The Telegraph) - The world needs leaders at the G8 summit
- Hugh Muir: (The Guardian) - The tragedy of Ray Lewis
- Gary Younge: (The Guardian) - It's no surprise that the BNP's rise and New Labour's demise are linked
- Max Hastings: (The Guardian) - It may seem ineffective, but we need G8 in order to face the daunting future
- Leading Article: (The Guardian) - The F-words
- Yasmin Alibhai-Brown: (The Independent) - In a sea of corruption we only catch the small fry
- Bruce Anderson: (The Independent) - Ray Lewis and Lord Phillips are both grappling with society's alienated groups
- Lucy Winkett: (The Independent) - We must address poverty, wars – and female bishops
- Leading Article: (The Independent) - Brown's opportunity to help Africa
- Melanie Phillips: (The Daily Mail) - We MUST continue his crusade against gangs
- Clive Crook: (The Financial Times) - America’s human capital is tested
And from around the world...
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The always-on-the-ball Dizzy got to this before we did.
How to blag your way through an election conversation.
And the campaign treasures just keep getting better and better. Today brings the latest in summer fashion for the political pooch.
Bark Obama or McCanine?
Hat Tip: Daily Intelligencer
As Americans bring out their barbecues this weekend, Obama can take pleasure in the fact that if a presidential burger-flipper is required, he's the voters' first choice.
According to an AP poll, 52 per cent of Americans would rather have Obama at their July 4th party than John McCain. And while men are evenly split between the two candidates, women would prefer Chef Obama by 11%. One in six people saying they'd vote for McCain prefer Obama as their barbecue guest; just one out of 20 Obama backers would invite McCain
Today, champion of the cookout. Tomorrow...?
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So the JFS has won its court case. The Judge decided that to rule against them would bring down the whole faith school network. He probably made the right decision.
But JFS has no cause for self congratulation. Its behaviour has been entirely wrong.
I'd better fill you in if you haven't been following the case.
JFS had been accused of racially discriminating against parents becuase it was willing to accept the children of Jewish born atheists but not those of observant parents where the mother had converted.
In the case of the Lightman family the mother had an Israeli conversion. She actually teaches at JFS and they are observant. Yet the school, using the Chief Rabbi's office to make the decision on Jewish status, has not accepted the conversion and therefore has not provided a place to the Lightman's daughter.
Legally they have been found to be within their rights. But just because it is legal, doesn't make the action correct.
The school is using large sums of public money. It should employ a generous and enlightened attitude to Jewish status, doing its best to provide places for observant Jewish families willing to attend.
To apply a small minded, nit picking, sectarian definition of Judaism is shameful in these circumstances.
These are very good people, trying their best to serve the community and doing spectacularly well at it most of the time but they have, I beg them to see, made a mistake.
It is their right to exclude families like the Lightmans and now they have established that it is their right. Can they not now allow compassion, common sense and generosity to prevail?
There is no point in prayer and religion if it doesn't allow for that, is there?
It's not too late.
History, perhaps, does not furnish a greater instance of this downfall of ambition, and the vanity of human project than Britain experienced in the revolt of America
Or so reported The Times in 1785. Two centuries later, we're getting over the pain but, in honour of the glorious fourth, we invite you to take a trip down memory lane.
Our fantastic Archive brings you all the news on the King who lost America, the original report on the Constitution and the benefits that Britain hoped they might receive from their former colony.
Take a look. And a very happy Fourth of July!
If you've been reading Comment Central for a while you will be aware of my admiration for Oliver Kamm, as a columnist, author and blogger.
So I am really pleased to announce that Oliver will be joining the leader writers here at The Times from next Monday.
We will announce plans for his popular and respected blog in due course.
Today in Times Comment
And from the rest of the papers...
- Jeff Randall: (The Telegraph) - How to save the BBC from itself (and get its hand out of our pockets)
- Siân Berry: (The Telegraph) - Gordon Brown's eco-towns are not green
- Frank Field: (The Telegraph) - Government must be cut down to size
- Leading Article: (The Telegraph) - Iran remains a threat to Israel's very existence
- Simon Jenkins: (The Guardian) - Let a church so fond of division test its worth in the marketplace of belief
- Jenni Russell: (The Guardian) - Adults must help make the streets safe
- Benjamin Senauer: (The Guardian) - The appetite for biofuel starves the poor
- Leading Article: (The Guardian) - Secrets and laws
- Dominic Lawson: (The Independent) - Tories used to condemn the politics of envy. Now they're seeing it from the other side
- Simon Birkett: (The Independent) - We're choking to death while the Government dithers
- Katy Guest: (The Independent) - In London we already walk by on the other side
- Leading Article: (The Independent) - The issue of bankers' pay cannot be ignored
- Andrew Alexander: (The Daily Mail) - It's always the poor who suffer from sanctions
- Philip Stephens: (The Financial Times) - Japan goes missing: invisible host at the summit
And from around the world...
 My fellow Times blogger Sam Coates draws my attention to this Labour Party fundraising scheme:
Be a character in Alastair Campbell's new novel
Our first sports celebration dinner coincided with the publication of edited extracts from Alastair Campbell’s diaries, The Blair Years, and our biggest moneyspinner last year, was a copy signed by the author as well as Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, John Prescott and Sir Alex Ferguson.
Now Alastair has turned his hand to fiction and his first novel, All In The Mind, will be published in November. This lot offers you the chance to be a (small) character in the novel. You will also be able to join Alastair for lunch to discuss which character you could be, or whether you want to wait to take a place in a future novel.
It is an almost irresistible temptation to make a donation to Damian MacBride's salary by paying to have Donny Simblestein, master political strategist, immortalised in Alastair's book.
Almost.
But instead, I thought CC readers might enjoy proposing their own characters for Mr Campbell's novel.
You might enjoy:
The Americans will never elect a black President.
You hear this stated quite confidently and quite often. But how true is it? The Washington Post has a new poll out suggesting that 3 in 10 Americans admit to race bias, though it isn't too clear from the article what this really means.
Michael Barone, the ace US pundit, is unpersuaded.
He proposes a thought experiment. How many people would have been unwilling to vote for Colin Powell in 1995 and are now unwilling to vote for Obama? This is the maximum proportion of the population unwilling to elect a black President full stop.
Barone argues that this proportion is less than 10 per cent. He suggests, say, 6 per cent although this is rather plucking numbers out of the air.
He then suggests that there are other reasons for being unwilling to vote for either - for instance wanting Bill Clinton and John McCain purely as checks on Congress. When you subtract people with these other reasons for the total: That leaves a vanishingly small percentage of voters unwilling to vote for a black under any circumstances: 1 percent, 2 percent, 3 percent, maybe 4 percent, tops.
Now these figures are hardly science, but I think that Michael makes a good point. He also, unfortunately misses a good point, too.
There may be people who would vote for a black Republican or a white Democrat but would not vote for a black Democrat. Racism may not mean they could not vote at all for an African American, but it might mean they pigeonhole African American candidates, fearing them as too left wing.
This wouldn't have been a problem for Powell, but it is for Obama.
I doubt many readers of Comment Central approve of the use of waterboarding on subjects being interrogated by the United States.
But still there may be some who confuse support for the war on terror with support for this technique.
If there are then I urge you to read Christopher Hitchens's article on his own waterboarding experience and his encapsulation of the argument against its use: 1. Waterboarding is a deliberate torture technique and has been prosecuted as such by our judicial arm when perpetrated by others.
2. If we allow it and justify it, we cannot complain if it is employed in the future by other regimes on captive U.S. citizens. It is a method of putting American prisoners in harm’s way.
3. It may be a means of extracting information, but it is also a means of extracting junk information. (Mr. Nance told me that he had heard of someone’s being compelled to confess that he was a hermaphrodite. I later had an awful twinge while wondering if I myself could have been “dunked” this far.) To put it briefly, even the C.I.A. sources for the Washington Post story on waterboarding conceded that the information they got out of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was “not all of it reliable.” Just put a pencil line under that last phrase, or commit it to memory.
4. It opens a door that cannot be closed. Once you have posed the notorious “ticking bomb” question, and once you assume that you are in the right, what will you not do? Waterboarding not getting results fast enough? The terrorist’s clock still ticking? Well, then, bring on the thumbscrews and the pincers and the electrodes and the rack.
I agree completely.
It is moral blindness of the worst kind to think that just because I (and Hitchens, of course) share the desire of the US administration to prosecute the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, we should go along with this dreadful practice.
As for those who claim that it isn't torture, Hitchens has this to say: I apply the Abraham Lincoln test for moral casuistry: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Well, then, if waterboarding does not constitute torture, then there is no such thing as torture.
Yesterday morning's leader in The Times on the Conservative Party resulted in a flurry of responses online.
James Forsyth, the main and indispensable voice of Coffee House noted: Today’s leader seems to go against what Danny was arguing just a fortnight ago. Then, he wrote that the “party that is first to let the voters know what it really stands for... loses”.
He was delighted by my apparent shift.
Well, as Michael Fabricant once said to Gyles Brandreth when described as wearing a wig - it is a bit more complicated than that.
I did indeed write that it is hard for any party to make clear what it stands for without creating contrast. If it moves from the centre ground it creates this contrast, but it also loses.
And I haven't changed my mind about that.
So why the leader?
Well, the leader was a declaration of intent. With a 20 point poll lead the Tories stand an excellent chance of being the next government. The job of The Times and its leaders will be to ensure that their claim to govern is carefully scrutinised.
We want to ensure that the national mood about Labour does not obscure the policies of the Tories and their fitness to govern. We don't want the Conservatives to take over and be no good.
Obviously the Tories have difficult strategic choices to make. They have to balance clarity with caution about voter sensibilities, they have to balance the size of their potential victory with the depth of their mandate and so on. And as a columnist I might want to weigh in on that.
But it is not the job of The Times and its leader column to solve the tactical and strategic dilemmas of the Tory party. The balance they want to strike is their problem.
Ours is to press for the policies and ideas we and our readers care about. And that we will do.
  Could a trip to the barbers be another indication that Pawlenty is preparing for a vice presidential post?
The Minnesota Governor has recently sacrificed his much-mocked mullet (pictured right) for a cleaner cut (see left). You can read more on Salon.
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Here's Kylie receiving her OBE from Prince Charles this morning. Captions are welcome but we have a pretty good idea of what she's saying: Thanks Sir. Now where can I find Ringo?
You can't. And a nation weeps.
Daniel Finkelstein
is Chief Leader Writer of The Times and writes a weekly column. Comment Central is his rolling guide to the best opinion on the web. Click
here for more information on the blog. Alice Fishburn, the Online Comment Editor, will also be posting.
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