Sex, Bombs and Burgers

by Peter Nowak

  Both Compton and Bush, who by now had extricated himself from the day-to-day operations of Raytheon but still held a seat on its board of directors, knew the company’s talented lead inventor, Percy Spencer, well. Raytheon was small compared with the likes of GE and Bell, but the company was just down the road from MIT in Waltham, Massachusetts, so Spencer was called in to take a look at the magnetron.9

  Percy Spencer was an orphan and, as a child, poor as dirt. His father died when he was eighteen months old and his mother abandoned him soon after, leaving him to be raised by his aunt and uncle in Howland, Maine. More bad luck struck at the age of seven when his uncle died. Spencer spent his childhood doing country chores such as saddling horses and chopping wood, and was so poor he used to hunt to eat. From the age of twelve he worked at a spool mill, starting before dawn and continuing on until after sunset.

  The enterprising youngster was extraordinarily curious, though, and when it came time to install electricity in the mill, he volunteered to do it. He learned by trial and error and emerged from the project a competent electrician. When the Titanic sank in 1912, his imagination was sparked by the heroism of the radio operators who had helped rescue survivors. So he joined the navy and learned wireless telegraphy: “I just got hold of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch at night,” he later recalled.10 His self-education went so well that the navy made him head of wireless production during the First World War. By 1940 the Raytheon engineer was renowned among scientists at MIT. “Spencer became one of the best tube designers in the world; he could make a working tube out of a sardine can,” one said.11

  This reputation served Spencer well when he asked if he could take the magnetron, Britain’s most closely guarded technological secret, home for the weekend. It was like asking the Queen if he could borrow the Crown Jewels. But with the combined brain trust of MIT vouching for Spencer, Henry Tizard reluctantly gave his blessing. Spencer returned with what now seems like a no-brainer of a suggestion: rather than carving the magnetron out of a single lump of copper, why not create it piecemeal from several sections?

  Western Electric had already been awarded a $30 million contract to manufacture the magnetron tubes, but was only managing to produce about fifteen a day using the machining method. Spencer promised he could outdo that production with his alternative procedure, so MIT gave Raytheon a contract to make ten tubes. Raytheon president Marshall then made a bet-the-company decision by investing in a new building and the special equipment required for the process, including a hydrogen oven.12 Within a month, Raytheon was making thirty magnetrons a day, twice Western Electric’s output. With Spencer’s promise fulfilled, the contracts started to roll in. Before long, the company was manufacturing the majority of the magnetrons for American and British forces. By the end of the war, Raytheon was pumping out nearly 2,000 magnetrons a day,13 about 80 percent of all the devices used by the Allies.14 Spencer and Marshall’s gamble had paid off handsomely. In 1945 Raytheon pulled in revenue of $180 million, a staggering jump from $1.5 million before the war.15

  More importantly, the gamble paid huge dividends for the Allies. From early 1941, when the new magnetron-powered detection system began to be installed, British and American planes had air superiority over their German rivals. The new system, dubbed “radio detection and ranging” or “radar,” persuaded Hitler to permanently cancel his already-delayed invasion. Radar ultimately saved an inestimable number of lives. During the first two years of the war, German bombs killed more than 20,000 London residents. In 1942, after radar had been fully installed, the number of fatalities plummeted to a mere twenty-seven.16 The scale of the horror experienced in Coventry in the fall of 1940 was never seen again in Britain. The country’s remaining architectural treasures, including the massive Gothic edifices of Wells Cathedral and Winchester Cathedral, escaped the war largely unscathed; thanks to the RAF’s secret weapon, England’s storied past survived to be admired by future generations. A new, modernized Coventry Cathedral, also dedicated to St. Michael, was built right next to the old one after the war, becoming the city’s third cathedral.

  In the later years of the war, Raytheon expanded beyond magnetron tubes into building whole radar systems, which were then installed on American ships in the Pacific. “With radar we could see the Japanese warships at night,” says Raytheon archivist and former vice-president Norman Krim, who has been with the company in various executive roles since its beginning. “They had no idea we could see them and that turned the war around.”17 Vannevar Bush shared that view in his memoirs, where he wrote that radar’s importance to ending the war was surpassed only by the atomic bomb.18 James Phinney Baxter III, the official historian of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, was no less effusive: “When the members of the Tizard Mission brought the cavity magnetron to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.”

  The magnetron’s military impact is hard to overstate. The scientists who developed radar had an easy moral justification: they were working on a defence system for an unjust war fought against an evil enemy. As with all technology, however, radar also had its dark side. Just as it saved thousands of lives, it also helped end many more. Radar guided the Enola Gay to its destination, Hiroshima, where it dropped the atomic bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people, and helped Bockscar find Nagasaki, where another 80,000 were killed by the second bomb.19 Radar has been installed in every guidance system, fighter jet and bomber used in every war since, bringing its total death count to date to an inestimable figure. Journalists who hailed the invention as “our miracle ally” in 1945 also correctly identified radar’s dual nature by tracing it back to its roots. “In a very real sense it represents the mythical death-ray by giving accurate precision so that the death stroke may be delivered,” said a New York Times editorial.20

  Radar in the Kitchen

  When the war ended, Raytheon’s fortunes sank just as fast as they had climbed. The American government had ratcheted up its defence spending as the war progressed, devoting almost 90 percent ($82.9 billion) of its entire 1945 budget to military expenditure. The following year, that spending decreased dramatically to just over three-quarters of the total budget, then plummeted to 37 percent ($12 billion) in 1947.21 Raytheon was scrambling. At the end of the war the company had employed 18,000 people but was down to 2,500 by 1947. Profit dropped to $1 million by 1956,22 from $3.4 million in 1945.23 Krim, a young engineer at Raytheon in its early days, remembers how dismayed Percy Spencer was. “He said, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’” Krim recalls. “No more war, no more radar, no more magnetrons. ‘I’ve got to find some use for these magnetrons to keep these people working.’ There was a mad rush for products we could make.”24

  Raytheon was able to sell radar devices to commercial shipping operations, including public services such as ferries, but needed to put its invention to commercial use if it was going to stay afloat. The company’s first real foray into the wider consumer market was the poorly thought-out Microtherm, a gadget that used the heating properties of the magnetron to treat a variety of ailments, including bursitis and arthritis. The equipment, sold only to doctors, medical suppliers and institutions, could heat “any area, allows temperature penetration of as much as two inches and increases blood circulation by 250%,” according to news reports at the time.25 As smart as Spencer was, frying away aches and pains with microwave radiation was simply not one of his better ideas. Doctors in the forties and fifties agreed and the Microtherm sold poorly. Krim, who by the sixties had risen through the Raytheon ranks to become the company’s “undertaker”—the person called in to dispose of unwanted assets—sold off the money-losing Microtherm business in 1961.26

  The magnetron’s ultimate commercial use was found by accident. Near the end of the war, Spencer was experimenting with magnetrons in his lab and noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Curious about the device’s heating effects, he brought in some popcorn ke
rnels, which popped after being exposed. The next day, he exploded an egg using its heat waves. (I remember making the same discovery at age eight, when I blew up an entire pack of hot dogs in our microwave, much to the dismay of my screaming mother.) Spencer knew he was on to something so he applied for and got a patent on microwave cooking. A team of engineers set to work on transforming the magnetron into a cooking device and before long, their efforts bore fruit: they created an oven that heated the water molecules in food but left moisture-free ceramic or plastic containers cool.

  The first microwave ovens were hulking behemoths. They stood nearly two metres tall, weighed three hundred kilos and were the size of a refrigerator. They weren’t cheap, either; Raytheon sold them mainly to large restaurants, hotel chains, ocean liners and railways for between $2,000 and $3,000, or the equivalent of $22,000 to $34,000 dollars in 2010 terms.27 They were made of solid steel with lead-lined ovens to prevent the microwaves from escaping. Their name, however, was perfect: the Radarange.

  Large industrial customers loved the Radarange because it dramatically cut down on cooking times. The oven cooked a potato in four minutes, a ten-ounce sirloin steak in fifty seconds, hot gingerbread in twenty seconds and a lobster in two-anda-half minutes. The highly competitive steamship industry— where cruise liners emphasized speed, style, luxury and, above all, cuisine—particularly prized them. Potato chip makers such as Lay’s also greatly preferred the microwave ovens to their traditional infrared counterparts for drying chips that had just been cooked in oil. Drying with infrared ovens took days while the Radarange did the trick in minutes.

  Raytheon tried to expand its market with the first Radarange for the home in 1955, but its enormous expense—about $1,200, or the equivalent of $9,000 today—meant few sales.28 There were also Microtherm-like safety concerns; many families weren’t sure if they wanted to be near a radiation-emitting device. By 1957 only a few thousand had found their way into American homes.29 Five years later, the ovens had dropped in price to just under $800, but that was still beyond the means of most families, and only 10,000 units had sold.30 Still, some consumers recognized the irreversible hand of progress when they saw it. “This is not a trend,” one housewife said. “The only thing I don’t cook in my electronic range is coffee. It is a time saver because I can prepare dinner in a half an hour.”31

  Raytheon’s new president Thomas Phillips shared that sentiment, even though the company had lost millions on the Radarange by 1965. He felt the only way to get a return on investment was to speed the oven’s adoption in the home, so he acquired Iowa-based Amana Refrigeration and transferred Raytheon’s knowledge of microwave ovens to the freezer maker. Krim recalls that Amana president George Foerstner’s plan to spur sales was simple. “He said, ‘I don’t give a damn what’s inside that box, it has to sell retail for less than $500.’” The homeappliance maker succeeded where the military contractor failed— by squeezing production efficiencies into the manufacturing process. Amana not only brought the Radarange’s price down to under $500, it also shrank the oven to fit on a countertop. Helped by government safety regulations that assured consumers the ovens were safe, sales boomed. Estimates pegged sales of microwaves in 1975 at 840,000, with Amana predicting that 10 percent of American homes would have one by early 1978. The ovens took off even faster in Japan, where safety concerns were less prevalent; about 1.5 million were sold in 1975, representing about 17 percent of households.32

  The secret behind the ovens’ success was best summed up in a 1976 New York Times article. Estelle Silverstone, a New York attorney whose husband was a radiotherapist, was quoted reflecting on the new reality facing women—that of a double-income, dual-career family, short on time for meal preparation. “I’ve had a microwave for seven years. I don’t think I could live without it,” she said. “Leftovers don’t taste like leftovers anymore. I hate to clean up and there are no pots and pans. It’s not a substitute for a conventional oven, but I find it indispensable.”33

  The age of cooking convenience had finally arrived in the home. The microwave oven was the perfect invention for a postwar society that put a premium on speed. With an increasing number of families seeing both parents going off to work, spare time was becoming more and more precious. The microwave

  helped facilitate those busy lives.

  By the early twenty-first century, 96 percent of American homes34 and 87 percent of British homes had a microwave oven.35 Today, about 350 million are in use around the world and another twenty million are sold each year. The microwave has reached such a level of ubiquity that it is no longer considered the iconic aspirational purchase it once was. In Britain, where the magnetron was invented, the microwave was removed from the basket of goods used to measure the cost of living in 2008. The plummeting value of the ovens, which can now be had for as low as $25, no longer provides a useful indicator of consumer trends. “We have to make room for new items in the basket and microwaves are no longer different to any other household appliance,” a British statistician said.36 The microwave’s invasion of the home is complete, with the previously high-tech device now as mundane as a toaster or can opener.

  The Microwave’s Sidekicks

  The Radarange didn’t revolutionize home cooking on its own, though. It had lots of help in the form of new plastics such as Teflon and Saran that were also side effects of weapons development. Teflon, for one, was a direct by-product of the Manhattan Project.

  In 1942 U.S. Brigadier-General Leslie Richard Groves, the military commander of the atomic bomb project, twisted the figurative arm of chemical and explosives maker DuPont to help. The company had wanted to steer clear of the conflict after being accused of profiteering during the First World War for selling munitions to Britain and France before the United States joined in. DuPont accepted Groves’s task reluctantly and limited itself to an official fee of one dollar37 after the general argued that the bomb would shorten the war and prevent tens of thousands of American casualties.38 His argument was likely strengthened by the fact that President Roosevelt’s daughterin-law Ethel was also the DuPont family’s heiress. Appearances aside, DuPont took on the key responsibility of producing plutonium, the man-made element derived from the chemical separation of uranium atoms. The company embraced the mission with zeal and selected Hanford, a small, remote mountain town along the Columbia River in Washington State, as the site of its main production facility. By late 1944, after an investment of several millions toward building chemical reactors, separation plants, raw material facilities, acres of housing and miles of roads, the once desolate town had grown to become the third largest city in the state, with a population of 55,000.39 Hanford was in fact the largest plant DuPont had ever constructed.40

  Plutonium production was a laborious and expensive process that required miles upon miles of pipes, pumps and barriers. An ounce of dust, grime or grease could ruin the entire system by entering through a tiny pinhole, yet a sealant that could perform a perfect patching job did not exist. DuPont decided to try out a substance that research chemist Roy Plunkett had accidentally discovered in 1938 at one of its labs in New Jersey. While experimenting with refrigerants, Plunkett opened a container of tetrafluoroethylene, only to find that the gas inside had solidified into a white resin. He found the new substance, which he dubbed polytetrafluoroethylene, to be extremely slippery and resistant to chemicals and heat. DuPont tested the substance as a sealant in its plutonium plant and found it plugged all the pipes and pumps perfectly. It was also put to use as a non-corrosive coating for artillery shell nose cones and as a high-performance lining for liquid fuel storage tanks, tasks at which it also excelled. The company patented the substance in 1941 and trademarked it just before the war ended under the name Teflon.

  The substance was first sold in 1946 as a sealant for the electronic, chemical and automotive industries and took off in the late fifties once a home use was found. In 1954 French engineer Marc Grégoire invented a process for bonding Teflon with an aluminum frying pan, wi
th which he launched his Tefal company. Consumers, happy about no longer having to fry their food in a pound of butter to stop it sticking to the pan, snapped up Tefal’s product (and the inevitable clones) in droves. By 1961 the company was selling a million pans a month.41 Teflon’s use expanded again in 1969, when American engineer Bob Gore discovered it could be stretched into a porous, super-strong filament. His new version of Teflon turned out to be an excellent transmitter of computer data and a good material for surgical supplies. Its ability to keep out moisture but let in air also meant it was the first material that could actually “breathe,” which made it ideal for waterproofing clothing. After several years of development, “Gore-Tex” clothes hit the market in 1980, and skiers would never again have to come home soaking wet.

  Saran Wrap also had its origins during the war, and like so many good inventions, it too was an accident. In what reads like the origin story of a comic-book super hero, Ralph Wiley, an unwitting college student working at Dow Chemical’s labs in Michigan, was performing his chores one night when he found some beakers he couldn’t scrub clean. He dubbed the green substance stuck to them “eonite” after an indestructible metal that was supposed to save the world from the Great Depression in a Little Orphan Annie comic strip. Upon examining the goo, Dow researchers gave it the more scientific name of polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC). Wiley didn’t end up gaining super powers, but Dow did turn the substance into a greasy green film, which was dubbed Saran, and tested it during the war by spraying it on fighter planes. Saran did a good job at keeping out oxygen and water vapour and was perfect for protecting the planes on aircraft carriers from the spray of salt water. The substance saved the navy time and effort by allowing planes to be shipped on the decks of aircraft carriers, rather than disassembled and stored below decks in pieces. Guns were also wrapped in the protective plastic, like death-dealing lollipops. A wartime ad from Dow proclaimed that when “men on our fighting fronts throughout the world ... unpack a machine gun they find it protected from moisture with Saran Film. There are no coatings of grease to be removed—no time lost. The gun slips out of its Saran Film envelope clean, uncorroded, ready for action!”