On July 11, 1883, a black-tie dinner at Cincinnati's Highland House restaurant was supposed to celebrate the first ordained graduates of Hebrew Union College — a proud, hopeful night for American Reform Judaism. Instead, it became one of the most infamous meals in American religious history. The caterer, working under Rabbi Isaac Mayer Wise, sent out a menu that opened with littleneck clams on the half shell, moved through crab, shrimp, and frogs' legs, and closed with ice cream — meat and dairy served at the very same table. Two rabbis, according to eyewitness memoirs, shot up from their chairs mid-course and walked straight out of the room. Others stayed, forks in hand, quietly weighing tradition against the moment in front of them.

Nobody had planned a controversy — the caterer had simply padded a kosher meat menu with whatever seafood looked freshest and most impressive that week. But the fallout was seismic. The "Trefa Banquet," as it became known, crystallized a widening rift between Reform Jews willing to bend dietary law and traditionalists who weren't, a rift that helped push more observant rabbis to break away and eventually found Conservative Judaism. A seating chart and a shellfish tower reshaped American religious life. Few dinners in history have mattered so much for reasons that had nothing to do with how the food actually tasted.

Otto Frederick Rohwedder, a jeweler-turned-inventor from Davenport, Iowa, spent nearly two decades chasing an idea everyone assumed was impossible: a machine that could slice a loaf of bread evenly and quickly. He started designing prototypes around 1912, betting that bakers would want to save customers the hassle of slicing bread by hand. Progress was slow, and disaster struck in 1917 when a fire destroyed his blueprints and his only working prototype — wiping out years of effort in a single night. Rohwedder rebuilt from scratch over the following decade, refining a design that held the loaf together while blades cut through it in one clean pass.

The biggest obstacle wasn't the slicing itself but keeping sliced bread fresh and intact afterward. Bakers worried that pre-sliced loaves would go stale faster and fall apart before reaching customers, so Rohwedder paired his slicer with a wrapping mechanism that immediately bound each loaf, preserving freshness and shape. That combined slice-and-wrap solution was what finally made the concept commercially viable.

On July 7, 1928, Frank Bench, owner of the Chillicothe Baking Company in Chillicothe, Missouri, took a chance on Rohwedder's machine and became the first baker in the country to sell mechanically sliced bread. The company advertised it as "the greatest forward step in the baking industry since bread was wrapped," and customers responded immediately, drawn to the novelty and convenience. Sales at the bakery reportedly jumped as much as 2,000% in the months that followed, and word spread fast to bakeries everywhere.

IHOP turns 68 this week. The first International House of Pancakes opened July 7, 1958, in Toluca Lake/Burbank, California, founded by brothers Jerry and Al Lapin along with Albert Kallis. The pitch was simple: cheap, all-day pancakes and waffles with a rotating cast of flavored syrups, served in a casual, family-friendly diner. It caught on fast — weekend lines stretched out the door — and by 1959 the chain became a division of International Industries, leaning hard into franchising to expand nationally.

The name "IHOP" itself wasn't official branding until 15 years later, in the early '70s, when a marketing push shortened "International House of Pancakes" to the acronym everyone uses today.