Who invented the bagel?
No one person. The bagel grew out of Jewish baking in Poland, and its first written mention is a 1610 rule from the Jewish community of Krakow.
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A ring of bread in Poland
Poland already had a ring shaped bread before the bagel. Smithsonian Magazine notes that the obwarzanek appears in records from 1394. Aish tells how Jews from German lands settled in Poland, took up that round roll and boiled it before baking. Back in 1264, Prince Boleslaw the Pious had declared that Jews could buy, sell and touch bread just like Christians. That boil then bake method is still what makes a bagel chewy and shiny on the outside.
Krakow, 1610
The first time the word turns up in writing is in 1610 in Krakow. The Jewish Council of the city issued a rule, in Yiddish, about celebrations for a circumcision, and bagels are named in it. Both Aish and Smithsonian point to this as the earliest known mention. It tells us the bagel was already an ordinary part of life there, something you could hand out at a family party, so it was probably older than the document itself.
The Vienna story
You may have heard a different tale. In 1683, so it goes, a Vienna baker made a bread shaped like a stirrup, a beugel, to thank King Jan Sobieski of Poland for driving back the Turkish army. It is a lovely story. Smithsonian calls it disputed, and the dates do not help it: the Krakow rule is 73 years older. So the stirrup may explain a name or a shape in Vienna, but it cannot be where the bagel began.
New York takes over
Jewish immigrants brought bagels to New York. A union of bagel bakers, Local 338, was founded there in 1907, and by the 1930s it covered about 30 bakeries, says New America. Bakers rolled every bagel by hand. Strikes in 1951, 1957 and 1962 caused what papers called bagel famines. Aish notes that the 1951 strike was when The New York Times first explained to its general readers what a bagel was. In 1963 Daniel Thompson perfected a machine that made over 2,000 bagels an hour.
Frozen, then everywhere
Machines and freezers took the bagel out of the neighbourhood. The Lender family bakery in New Haven, Connecticut, began freezing bagels in 1954, Aish reports. In the 1970s their television adverts sold them as the Jewish English muffin, and Kraft bought the company in 1984. By the mid 1990s, Smithsonian says, bagels were a multibillion dollar business in America. Montreal kept its own style, boiled in honey water. Today one bagel with a spread is a normal breakfast in many places.