Microwaves and Chocolate Bars.

[Touchstone]

A revolution has occurred. A revolution that you didn't even notice happening.

Where was this revolution?

In cooking, of course. The microwave oven is the first new method of cooking since man invented fire.

Surprisingly, no one ever set out to discover the microwave oven. It was an accidental discovery.

Here's the scoop:

Way back in 1940, two scientists, Sir John Randall and Dr. H. A. Boot, invented a device called a magnetron to produce microwaves in their lab at England's Birmingham University.

What did they want the magnetron for?

Real simple - to cook the Nazi's goose.

The magnetron is a key component to the radar (radio detecting and ranging) which bounced microwaves off the enemy's war machines to detect their presence.

Cooking food was not exactly part of their vision.

After the war, in 1946, a Raytheon Company engineer named Dr. Percy Spencer was about to make history.

Doc Spencer was performing tests on a magnetron tube when he got strong cravings for the chocolate bar that was in his pocket.

He reached into his pocket only to be surprised by a nice gooey mess. (Some claim that the chocolate was on his desk and not in his pocket.) Doc Spencer was well aware of the fact that the magnetron produced heat, but he did not sense any. He suspected that the magnetron had melted the chocolate, not his body heat.

(Now, I don't know about you, but if I noticed that all the food products brought near this thing were being quickly cooked, I would assume that the machine was doing the same to me. I really doubt that a new type of oven would be my first thought ...)

He needed to test his theory that the magnetron was cooking his food.

He had to use... (drum roll please)... Science!

He sent out for a bag of popcorn and placed it in front of the magnetron tube.

Guess what? The popcorn popped all over the floor.

The next morning he tried cooking up some eggs. In a very famous incident, one of his fellow colleagues was very curious and happened to get a bit too close - the egg blew up in his face (Is this where we get the expression egg on his face?).

Raytheon set out to make the first microwave oven. Since the magnetrons were used to make radars, they gave it the name Radar Range.

Raytheon succeeded in building the oven, but it was very large. After all, the 1940's were not known for miniaturization of electronics.

These Radar Ranges did not sell well. Most were sold to restaurants or to the military.

In 1952, Tappan introduced the first home model at the very low price of just $1295!

Surprisingly, they started to sell and the rest is microwave history.

Now we are stuck eating all those delicious microwave dinners. Yummy! (Yuk!)