It’s a miracle!
Visits to restaurants were rare events for me as a child. But one restaurant visit marked the dawn of a new age in my life. It was the early 1970s, and we had been invited by the owner to come and see something wonderful in the new pizza joint in town.
Once we were seated, the owner, Mr. Stout, brought out a large, raw potato. He had each of us handle the potato to verify that it was entirely raw and cold.
Those were the days when potatoes were wrapped in foil and baked for 75 minutes. Everyone knew how to bake a potato.
Yet Mr. Stout placed the potato on a plastic plate. “I’ll be back in 10 minutes,” he said. Sure enough he returned as promised with the VERY SAME POTATO cooked tender and moist. He cut it open and let us each taste the interior. It was truly cooked and tasted exactly like a traditionally baked potato!
I could hardly get my mind around this miracle. I knew all about cooking. How was this done? How could this be true?
Mr. Stout took us back to the kitchen and showed us a device he called a microwave oven. He didn’t really know how it worked, but he said it used radar waves to cook the food.
I was still baffled. My friend had an Easy Bake Oven, which used the heat from a lightbulb to cook mini-cakes. But the process was painfully slow, not wondrously fast.
The concept of cooking food using very fine-textured waves of light had been patented by the Raytheon Co. in 1945. They had become commercially available (though very expensive and unthinkably cumbersome) in 1947.
The heating effect of microwaves was discovered by a Raytheon employee, Percy Spencer. He was working with microwaves, building radar systems during World War II. He was standing near the magnetron generating microwaves and noticed that the chocolate candy bar in his pocket had melted.
Spencer began testing the effects, first popping popcorn and then exploding an egg. He built a metal box to contain the waves. He quickly saw its commercial value and began testing its possibilities and limitations.
A prototype was first tested in a Boston kitchen.
Already a famous physicist, Spencer had been raised by an aunt when his mother abandoned him as a young child. His uncle died when he was a young boy, and he eventually dropped out of grammar school to help provide for his aunt by working in a spool factory.
In his late teens, he heard that a paper mill was going to be built nearby.
They planned to use electricity. The concept fascinated young Spencer, and he set out to read everything he could find about electricity. By the time the construction of the paper mill got underway, Spencer was hired as one of three electricians to wire the plant.
He joined the Navy at age 18 and taught himself trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics and metallurgy by reading textbooks while on night watch.
Spencer eventually became the world’s leading expert on radar communication systems. Working for Raytheon, he devised a method of diecutting parts for magnetrons, the key component of radar systems, and then soldering them together. Before Spencer’s method, Raytheon had been producing magnetrons at a rate of 17 per day. The new method increased production to 2,700 per day.
Though he invented and developed the microwave oven, he received no royalties. His employer gave him the customary $2 tip for employees responsible for new patents. He did receive many other honors, including an honorary Doctor of Science degree from the University of Massachusetts.
Forty years after its invention, I was given my first microwave. I thought it took up too much space in my cramped kitchen, but my mother-in-law insisted that I would come to like it.
Now, if an American has no access to a microwave, they’re officially camping. Thanks to Percy Spencer, an uneducated American genius.
Only in America. God bless it.