Who invented the microwave oven?

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The microwave oven, a multipurpose kitchen appliance used for baking, roasting, grilling, toasting, and heating food, is today an essential kitchen accessory that is prized for its speed and versatility. It might surprise you to know that such a device did not come about as a result of someone trying to find a faster and better way to cook, but was the outcome of an accidental discovery. It was Percy LeBaron Spencer (1894–1970), an American inventor, who stumbled upon the idea of using microwave energy to cook food, after finding that radar waves had melted a candy bar in his pocket.

The story behind the invention is as follows: Percy Spencer, a school dropout, joined the U.S Navy and taught himself radio technology and physics, eventually becoming one of the world’s leading experts in radar tube design. He was working as the head of the power tube division at the Raytheon company, a defence contractor, and was experimenting on a new vacuum tube called a magnetron.

One day, while standing near a magnetron, he realised that a candy bar he had in his pocket had melted. In a bid to investigate this phenomenon, he began experimenting with other food objects to see if a similar heating effect could be observed. His first experiment was with popcorn, and the lab was soon full of sputtering and popping corn. Next he put an egg in a kettle, and positioned the magnetron to direct the microwaves into a hole in the kettle. Moments later, as one of his colleagues was peering into the kettle, the egg exploded in his face.

Spencer concluded that microwave radiations from the tube were causing the objects to heat up from within. He went on to invent the first microwave oven, the Radarange. A bulky, expensive device that weighed more than 350 kg and stood 5.5 feet tall, it was used exclusively in restaurants and other commercial establishments where food had to be cooked quickly and on a large scale. It was patented in 1945. It took years of experimentation before the smaller domestic version emerged in 1967.