If you’ve ever lived alone, or if you ever were a student, chances are, you’re more than familiar with the microwave oven. It’s become an inseparable part of the modern kitchen, equally adapted for quick pre-heating of bachelor meals and defrosting meat for complicated culinary creations. One can find surprising the fact that no one deliberately wanted to make cooking easier. The microwave’s close cousin is, actually, the military radar. In fact, the first brand of microwaves launched in 1946 was named “Radarange”, although microwaves were too bulky and expensive for home use until 1960s.
So, where to radars come in? To simplify, the radar transmitter pulsates of radio waves or microwaves which bounce off any object in their path. If a solid object is in the way of these rays, it reflects a portion of the wave back to the radar installation, which then calculates the object’s position. The question is, how did we get from detecting bombers to making popcorn with the same technology? Well, we have Percy Spenser, an American engineer working for the US Navy to thank for that.
An article by Don Murray in August 1958 Issue of Readers Digest recalls:
"The story is typical of Percy Spencer's direct, homey approach, which he brings even to the miracle world of modern electronics. One day a dozen years ago he was visiting a lab where magnetrons, the power tubes of radar sets, were being tested. Suddenly, he felt a peanut bar start to cook in his pocket. Other scientists had noticed this phenomenon, but Spencer itched to know more about it. He sent a boy out for a package of popcorn. When he held it near a magnetron, popcorn exploded all over the lab. Next morning he brought in a kettle, cut a hole in the side and put an uncooked egg (in its shell) into the pot. Then he moved a magnetron against the hole and turned on the juice. A skeptical engineer peeked over the top of the pot just in time to catch a faceful of cooked egg. The reason? The yolk cooked faster than the outside, causing the egg to burst."
If they had modern safety protocols, this probably would have never happened. Moreover, Spencer wasn’t really a scientist – he was a man interested in engineering, but lacked classical scientific education. Perhaps it is this combination of recklessness and unshaped thirst for discovery which made the microwave oven possible. Don Murray wrote:
An M.I.T. scientist explained to me how Spencer operates: "The educated scientist knows many things won't work. Percy doesn't know what can't be done. Like Edison, he will cut and fit and try and throwaway and try again."
After the World War II Spencer was employed for a company called Raytheon, which patented the microwave oven in 1945 and later licensed it to other manufacturers. The first oven was a giant metal box with electromagnetic field generators shooting microwaves inside. The metal box was required so that electromagnetic waves would have no way to escape – this allowed for safe and controlled use of the device – no more melted candy in pockets.
The food experiments with the box have proven to be a success and the oven made its way into mass production. Although Spencer later became Senior Vice President and a Senior Member of the Board of Directors at Raytheon, he was only paid $2 for inventing the microwave.
