Montreal 1956

Montreal 1956


My teacher invited her husband into the classroom.  His company was working on something new and he came in to demonstrate it to us.

He had, what I remember as, a contraption, made up of many electrical wires, with a probe at one end.  He also had several packages of hotdogs.  We watched with amazement as he stuck the probe into one of the hot dogs and within seconds the hot dog was fully cooked.  He repeated this ‘trick’ until each of us was chomping on a delicious hotdog.  I remember being absolutely riveted to this demonstration of what he called microwaves.

A Brief History of the Microwave Oven
The microwave oven was invented as an accidental by-product of war-time (World War 2) radar research using magnetrons (vacuum tubes that produce microwave radiation, a type of electromagnetic radiation that has a wavelength between 1 mm and 30 cm).

In 1946, the engineer Dr. Percy LeBaron Spencer, who worked for the Raytheon Corporation, was working on magnetrons. One day at work, he had a candy bar in his pocket, and found that it had melted. He realized that the microwaves he was working with had caused it to melt. After experimenting, he found that microwaves would cook foods quickly - even faster than conventional ovens that cook with heat.

The Raytheon Corporation produced the first commercial microwave oven in 1954; it was called the 1161 Radarange. It was large, expensive, and had a power of 1600 watts. The first domestic microwave oven was produced in 1967 by Amana (a division of Raytheon), marking the beginning of the use of microwave ovens in home kitchens. Although sales were slow during the first few years, partially due to the oven’s expensive price tag, the concept of quick microwave cooking had arrived. In succeeding years, Litton and a number of other companies joined the countertop microwave oven market. By the end of 1971, the price of countertop units began to drop and their capabilities were expanded.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microwave_oven