When engineer Percy Spencer discovered that his chocolate bar became a mess when near a magnetron, it lead to the invention of what modern convenience?
Microwave oven government in September 1940. The magnetron was later described by American historian James Phinney Baxter III as "[t]he most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores". Contracts were awarded to Raytheon and other companies for mass production of the magnetron. In 1945, the specific heating effect of a high-power microwave beam was accidentally discovered by Percy Spencer, an American self-taught engineer from Howland, Maine. Employed by Raytheon at the time, he noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a chocolate bar he had in his pocket. The first food deliberately cooked with
Percy Spencer the course of the next few years. His improvements were among those that increased magnetron production to 2,600 per day. For his work, he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Award by the U.S. Navy. 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 phenomenon, but he was the first to investigate it. He decided to experiment using food, including popcorn kernels, which became the world’s first microwaved popcorn. In another experiment, an