Early in 1940, two British engineers, Harry Boot and John Randall, working under Australian physicist Mark Oliphant built a cavity magnetron, an efficient device for producing high power microwaves as part of an effort to develop better radar detection systems. In this they were eminently successful. By the middle of the year, radar could be used to locate a submarine periscope at six miles. After World War II ended, research on magnetrons continued. In 1946 Percy Spencer, an engineer working at Raytheon, walked through a room in which a magnetron was being tested and noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. It occurred to him that the microwaves being generated by the magnetrons could be used to cook food. The next day he placed unpopped popcorn near an operating magnetron, and watched as fluffy white kernels flew around the room. He then tried to cook an egg in the shell, which cooked so quickly it blew up in his colleagues face. Raytheon and Spencer patented the microwave oven in 1950, arguing that it provided a tasty and more sanitary popcorn product. Microwave popcorn is now a ubiquitous part of lab life. In fact, researchers using physical chemistry to develop corn that pops better in the microwave!
Spencer never completed elementary school, but made major contributions to the development of magnetrons for radar and other applications.
Photo of Percy Spencer
Slide show about the microwave patent from PBS History Detectives.
science : chemistry : popcorn : chocolate
- Home
- Angry by Choice
- Catalogue of Organisms
- Chinleana
- Doc Madhattan
- Games with Words
- Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
- History of Geology
- Moss Plants and More
- Pleiotropy
- Plektix
- RRResearch
- Skeptic Wonder
- The Culture of Chemistry
- The Curious Wavefunction
- The Phytophactor
- The View from a Microbiologist
- Variety of Life
Field of Science
-
-
-
The Hayflick Limit: why humans can't live forever1 month ago in Genomics, Medicine, and Pseudoscience
-
-
Course Corrections4 months ago in Angry by Choice
-
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Catalogue of Organisms
-
The Site is Dead, Long Live the Site2 years ago in Variety of Life
-
Does mathematics carry human biases?3 years ago in PLEKTIX
-
-
-
-
A New Placodont from the Late Triassic of China5 years ago in Chinleana
-
Posted: July 22, 2018 at 03:03PM6 years ago in Field Notes
-
Bryophyte Herbarium Survey6 years ago in Moss Plants and More
-
Harnessing innate immunity to cure HIV8 years ago in Rule of 6ix
-
WE MOVED!8 years ago in Games with Words
-
-
-
-
post doc job opportunity on ribosome biochemistry!9 years ago in Protein Evolution and Other Musings
-
Growing the kidney: re-blogged from Science Bitez9 years ago in The View from a Microbiologist
-
Blogging Microbes- Communicating Microbiology to Netizens10 years ago in Memoirs of a Defective Brain
-
-
-
The Lure of the Obscure? Guest Post by Frank Stahl12 years ago in Sex, Genes & Evolution
-
-
Lab Rat Moving House13 years ago in Life of a Lab Rat
-
Goodbye FoS, thanks for all the laughs13 years ago in Disease Prone
-
-
Slideshow of NASA's Stardust-NExT Mission Comet Tempel 1 Flyby13 years ago in The Large Picture Blog
-
in The Biology Files
The Who, What, When, Where and Why of Chemistry
Chemistry is not a world unto itself. It is woven firmly into the fabric of the rest of the world, and various fields, from literature to archeology, thread their way through the chemist's text.
3 comments:
Markup Key:
- <b>bold</b> = bold
- <i>italic</i> = italic
- <a href="http://www.fieldofscience.com/">FoS</a> = FoS
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
True enough, though the melting may have been faster than expected!
ReplyDeleteErm, isn't this physics, not chemistry?
ReplyDeleteA former physicist
Well...this is technically engineering, I suppose. Microwave work is done by chemists, both spectroscopy and to "cook" reactions, so I would call it fair game. I was lecturing on it the day I posted this...
ReplyDelete