The History of Microwave Oven.
Mircowave oven is a norm today. The dull halogen light. The spinning glass plate. The humming that terminates in a “BEEP.” It's an immediately familiar to most of us. This is the way we cook today.
The microwave technology is beloved for its speed and ease of use. But what you might not know about this indispensable kitchen appliance is when and how the microwave was invented.
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| Percy Spencer |
The true story is that it was invented utterly by accident one fateful day more than 70 years ago, when a Raytheon engineer named Percy Spencer was testing a military-grade magnetron (to improve the power level of the magnetron tubes to be used in radar sets) and suddenly realized his peanut cluster bar snack had melted. It was on that fateful day in 1946, things happen by accident.
A radar magnetron is a sort of electric whistle that, instead of creating vibrating sound, creates vibrating electromagnetic waves.
In 1947, just a year after Spencer’s snack food serendipity, the first commercial microwave oven hit the market. Called the “Radarange,” it weighed nearly 750 pounds and cost more than $2,000. Needless to say, it wasn’t a big seller. The first domestic microwave was introduced in 1955, but it too failed to launch because it was expensive and because microwave technology was still an unknown.
It wasn’t until 1967, two decades after its invention, that the microwave oven finally caught on in American homes in the form of Amana’s compact “Radarange.” By 1975, a million microwaves were sold every year.
