How A Melted Chocolate Bar Gave Birth To The Microwave Oven

Some kitchen appliances have been around for many years but others are newcomers to the scene, such as the Instant Pot or something similar. It’s something that many people use every day.

Something else that is a relative newcomer is the microwave oven. The microwave may have been in the kitchen for decades, but when you compare it to items such as a refrigerator or convection oven, it really is a youngster.

Microwaves are still something that we use almost every day. Even if we don’t use them for cooking our food, we use them to reheat food and to warm-up drinks.

Although they’re something that we use frequently, they’re is also something that we often don’t know much about. Most of us don’t understand the technology behind our microwave and we don’t understand its humble beginning.

It seems as if the microwave oven technology was not developed out of a need, it was a sheer accident. According to a video by Weird History Food, a man by the name of Percy Spencer was working at Raytheon Technologies at the time that this accident took place.

Spencer was an expert in radar tube engineering and one day when he was standing in front of a radar, the chocolate peanut bar in his pocket melted.

Rather than just looking at it as a blunder, he started doing some experiments to see how food would respond to such a powerful electromagnetic field. From that point, the microwave was born.

At first, the microwaves that were made for use in the kitchen were expensive. They also had a significant size to them, but as is the case with much technology, they got smaller as the years went by.

By the time the 1980s came around, microwave ovens were very popular. Since that time, they aren’t as popular but you would have a difficult time finding a kitchen where one didn’t exist.

You can learn more about the history of the microwave oven in this video: