CUT THE RIBBON, PERCY LeBARON SPENCER

Posted on March 25, 2013 by admin

Many of you surely know how to cook and enjoy cooking. Many of us, like me by chance, hate cooking. It doesn’t mean having no taste or don’t like food. It means not liking spending time in the kitchen, preparing, cutting, mashing, boiling, etc. Technology has helped many of us with a product: the microwave oven and this Cut the Ribbon is dedicated to the man who invented it by chance. I know many readers will disagree on this invention but the microwave has been such a huge invention that we can’t help considering it positive. Mr. Percy LeBaron Spencer was an American engineer and inventor, who in 1939, he was one of the world’s leading experts in radar tube design. One day while building magnetrons, Spencer was standing in front of an active radar set when he noticed the candy bar he had in his pocket had melted. Spencer was not the first to notice this issue, but he was the first to investigate it. The experiment with food included popcorn kernels, which became the world’s first microwaved popcorn. Spencer then decided to get a kettle and cut a hole in the side, then put the whole egg in the kettle and positioned the magnetron to direct the microwaves into the hole. The result was the egg exploding in the face of one of his co-workers, who were looking in the kettle to observe. Spencer then created the first true microwave oven by attaching a high density electromagnetic field generator to an enclosed metal box. In 1947 the first commercially produced microwave oven was about 6 feet tall, weighed and cost too much. In 1967 the first relatively affordable and reasonably sized microwave oven was available for sale. Since there are hundreds of millions of microwaves in use today, it is a kitchen appliance that heats food by bombarding it with electromagnetic radiation. The Microwave oven has quickened our lives efficiently, and has helped many of us, cooking haters.