I can remember getting our first one when I was fairly young. A microwave oven. My Dad was a design engineer at Frigidaire, and he worked on developments in refrigeration. We got a new refrigerator every couple of years, and we always changed the color. Of course, then, we had to paint the kitchen to match. And Mom and my brother Ed would put up fabric in the area above the cupboards, like wallpaper. Oh. We were cutting edge, I’ll tell you.
Anyway, the microwave. As I recall, Dad just carried it in. The thing wasn’t boxed. It must have been one of the first ones at Frigidaire. Maybe we were a test family. I don’t know.
We all gathered in the kitchen, huddled right around that corner of the countertop, and watched as Dad placed a bowl of water in the oven. We watched as it came to a boil in a matter of seconds. Like magic, I’ll tell you.
More than anything, we pelted Dad with questions. And as always, he explained, very clearly, the science behind how the microwave worked. Then, we melted cheese. And heated soup. Holy heck. It was a big day at the Kronenberger household.
I was young enough that I wasn’t allowed to use it by myself. I could barely wait for the day I got my microwave driving license. I made a hot bologna sandwich.
All of this sprung to mind when I learned that the microwave was invented after a researcher walked by a radar tube and a chocolate bar melted in his pocket.
It happened in 1945. That heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by a guy named Percy Spencer. He was a self-taught engineer and was employed by Raytheon at the time. At any rate, he was working on an active radar set for something else. And that’s when he noticed the chocolate bar in his pocket.
He didn’t stop there. He put the apparatus in a metal box, so the microwave power from the magnetron had no way to escape. The first food Spencer deliberately cooked in his new microwave contraption was popcorn. The second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of his lab buddies.
The rest, as they say, is history. On October 8, 1945, Raytheon filed a United States patent application for Spencer’s microwave cooking process. It wasn’t long before one of those magnetron microwaves was placed in a Boston restaurant for testing.
It was the late 1960s before they started work on home models. By the early 1970s, they were available at stores.
I use a microwave all the time, without even thinking about it. I know some people who won’t go near them because they are afraid the ovens give off radiation. But, if the door closes properly, microwave ovens are a safe method of cooking.
Mostly, I am struck by how this has been one of the many inventions during my lifetime. Things that generations before me did not know. Of course, the list is numerous now, especially in the last 20 years with the advent of microchip technology.
And it always makes me wonder what will come in the next ten, twenty years. Or will we head in the other direction and all be pounding sticks into the ground with stones?
I guess time will tell. Until then, we’ll just have to watch the water boil.
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“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
― Arthur C. Clarke
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“A CD. How quaint. We have these in museums.”
― Eoin Colfer, The Eternity Code
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“It’s supposed to be automatic, but actually you have to push this button.”
― John Brunner, Stand on Zanzibar
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That melted candy bar in your pocket.
