American Scientist

When I was a child, I enjoyed accompanying my father to the bakery, where I could observe things that I found to be as sweet intellectually as the confections on the shelves were sensually. My appetite for the mechanical devices and gadgets in the place was insatiable. I was fascinated by the slicing machine into which the woman behind the counter placed a full loaf of bread and received a neatly sliced one in return. After lifting the segmented loaf from the machine with two hands, imperceptibly compressing it the way a juggler does a set of cigar boxes that looks to be defying gravity, the bakery woman upended the loaf of precisely aligned slices and balanced it in a vertical position in the palm of one hand while reaching with the other and snapping open the white paper bag into which she would slide the sliced loaf and in which the customer would carry the bread home. To me, indeed, the whole process was the greatest thing since sliced bread itself.