Radar Love

Marc: Okay, so because we love kitchen appliances,

Renee: We've done a refrigerator.

Marc: What else have we done?

Renee: We've done the washer and dryer.

Marc: Oh, yeah, washer and dryer.

Renee: And in the UK, that's in your kitchen. Yeah, it's in your kitchen. Yeah.

Marc: We've done other, oh, TV. That's not really a kitchen, but I guess it's appliance.

Renee: Yeah, we've gone down the consumer economics, you know.

Marc: Yeah, yeah. We haven't done ovens, stoves.

Renee: You know, we haven't done. Well, you know, have they really gone out of their way to be any better?

Marc: No. But, well, this kind of stove for tonight, the microwave, the microwave oven.

Renee: Yeah, I guess.

Marc: Yeah. I think, okay, so.

Renee: I mean, convection ovens and air fryers have been around forever. Yeah. They've been around forever, though, right? Like, you can buy a KitchenAid oven that's a convection oven. It'll make things crispy for you.

Marc: Okay. Before we get to microwaves, I think I'm going to get Meredith the Ninja. Like there's a two-drawer ninja air fryer. Oh, yes.

Renee: So you can do the chicken and fries at the same time. It's like... Or in your case, the tofu and the fries.

Marc: At the same time. Yeah, I mean, we've not... It was, it's funny because we didn't have an air fryer and then we had some friends move out of the UK and go back to the States and they left us their air fryer and we've used it like almost every day. You know, it's like we use it a lot.

Renee: Because having crispy like, you know, shrimp tempura is like a thing. Like that's a thing.

Marc: Yeah, it's a thing.

Renee: Like, you know what, though? I just buckled and bought the deep fryer just because I thought, do I really like like super crispy French fries?

Marc: Yeah. I mean, I've got, we do have a, you know, it's just the oil, dealing with the oil is such a pain, so.

Renee: Yeah. So I have to, there's a whole system to get the bad oil out and the good oil. Well, if you buy one that has a drain in it, it's much easier. Like, if I did it again, I'd get the ones where you could just drain it out the bottom.

Marc: Oh, well, that's probably. Yeah.

Renee: Yeah. Instead of the way I have it now, which is I have to pour it out and hope I get it.

Marc: Back into the container. Exactly. You've got to have a funnel and you burn yourself or whatever. So anyways, we're not going to talk about any of that stuff. We're going to talk about microwaves. Because microwaves has this, like, really cool. Military background and consumer electronics and science and and all that stuff and and that's that's what we love we love those stories that come from you know consumer electronics come from military research so but it was like all your

Renee: Favorite things started out killing other people first just remember that all your favorite things started with a completely different.

Marc: Life see this This is one of those things that instead of going bad, it went good, right?

Renee: Oh, like this is our hope for AI. A microwave is the same hope we have for AI.

Marc: I don't see a microwave subscription. Like there's not microwave as a service, you know?

Renee: Shut up, shut up. You'll get people just shush.

Marc: Shush, shush, shush. Anyways, okay. So I remember my first microwave, my mom's first microwave, and it was when I was a kid and it was like in the mid 80s. So we were kind of behind the curve as far as microwaves, but the thing was gigantic. It was like a freaking huge box. And it, and I think, I think it was, it did have a plate and it did rotate, but you know, my mom was cool about like looking out for the deals and you know, what went on sale. And she did all her consumer reports research and stuff. I think my grandfather had the consumer reports like subscription. Right. So, cause he was the same way. So, so, you know, she, she did a bunch of research and then the thing, you know, arrives and it's this massive thing. Thing. And what I remember, what I remember most about the microwave.

Renee: You could have fit the plutonium somewhere.

Marc: What I remember was mystery meat burritos, heating up mystery meat burritos that my dad would make.

Renee: It's like lava too when they're hot in the middle. You can't get it off your tongue. You're like, ah, ah, ah. Yeah.

Marc: He would make up a batch of those things and then we'd freeze them and then there'd be like dozens of them in the freezer and then you just pull one out and unwrap it and throw it in. So that's what I remember the most about our first microwave. The thing was huge and expensive and yeah, probably melted my eyes.

Renee: I spent a lot of time with my grandmother as a kid and she didn't have one. My grandmother didn't have a microwave. But my parents, when they redo the kitchen the first time, because they buy that ridiculous house on the hill that's built in 1901 or whatever. I.

Marc: Remember like that we yeah i remember going and seeing the kitchen in its half done state like the one and only time i was at your parents house there

Renee: There you go it was half done that was my whole childhood everything was like half gone there were buckets of tools everywhere at any rate um the, first time they're redoing the kitchen because this is an old house like it's an old house with the doors that are in the walls where you can pull them shut to keep a room warm like that kind of like no insulation double brick like there's red brick on the inside and And that was supposed to be the installation. Like, what? Oh, and radiators. You had to bleed them every winter to get them to work again. Like, yeah, yeah. The whole thing, right? But you know what? It was the big yellow brick house and it was really, it was cute.

Marc: It was a cool house.

Renee: It was a good house. It was good. And it had a beautiful view of Oakland. It was just a pretty house. At any rate, I remember coming home one day and there was a microwave. So it's one of those ones that goes, it has the light and the fan under it, right? And it goes, and it's above the stove, right? And so that's where it would be, right? And so, but I also, what I remember most about that was you had to buy special cookware. Couldn't put plastic in there at all, right? Because it would melt. You couldn't put Tupperware in there, it would melt. So you had to go buy special stuff. And then it was special stuff for like the bacon one looked like a parrot stand because you hung your bacon over it and you stuck the bacon in there. It was so rich. And then there were whole cookbooks on how to cook that stuff. So if you wanted to cook a baked potato, you had to poke holes in it then you had to wrap it in a wet like, dish towel and then stick it in there for like four minutes and then take it out and stab it some more and stick it like it was ridiculous it was ridiculous so but the cool thing was was like you didn't need mom to eat, right like you could just you could use the microwave it's not if you opened it up in the middle the microwaves weren't going to kill you you know no it wasn't going to give you a brain damage like the tv Would they? Would they? I don't know. So, yeah, so it was all that. But what I remember most was one time PJ was making, PJ was making, I'm sorry, Paige, I'm going to tell the story. PJ was making hot dogs and he had it wrapped in a paper towel because it's supposed to keep the moisture in it. Yeah, so the bread doesn't, you know, dry out because it will. And so it's all wrapped up, right? So, but, you know, things catch on fire in the microwave. They do. They do. And so the paper towel's burning. We're all screaming. PJ opens it. There's smoke billowing out. He grabs it to pull it out, to just kind of put it out. And then a piece flew into his hair and his hair got on fire. And so now we're trying to put out the fire in PJ's head. And then ever since then, anytime you saw him, you'd be like, and this is Twilver. Because you know how Michael Jackson got his hair on fire that whole time? Like, yeah, like forever we made fun of, sorry, PJ, forever we made fun of PJ over that. Like, so that's what I remember about microwaves. They were horribly dangerous and it almost killed my brother. and it gave us stuff to make fun of for years. So upside and downside. That's what. I remember. Took it from the freezer.

Marc: All right, so the box on the kitchen counter started life as a piece of radar equipment from the Second World War. The first microwave oven in 1947 stood nearly six feet tall, weighed about 750 pounds, cost around, get this, $5,000 in 1947 dollars. Yeah, and had to be plumbed into the water supply to keep it cool. 50 years later, it was $200 in nine out of 10 American kitchens. And yeah, I know, crazy, huh?

Renee: So welcome to another- No, I just keep thinking. Go ahead, just welcome us to the episode, then I got to tell you what I'm thinking. Oh, okay.

Marc: Welcome to another episode of the Nostalgic Nurse Podcast, where we're talking about tech, past, present, and future, and tonight it's the microwave oven.

Renee: Okay, so here's what I'm thinking. So we had to pull in water to cool the first microwave. Like, so seriously, seriously. Isn't that crazy? That's crazy, because then you're thinking to yourself, all this fighting we're having over GPs and how we have to cool them with water and how it's going to completely collapse the water base, but in 50 years, none of that will probably matter. Like, oh, my God, we're in the exact same place we started, except now, instead of cooking hot dogs, we're making, I guess, deep fakes of dogs cooking hot dogs. Oh, Bigfoot cooking hot dogs.

Marc: Okay, I might have to put that as the episode, like, you know... Bigfoot. All right.

Renee: So, okay. Okay. So, but before we get to the war, what is a microwave? It's a word we use every day, and I'm not sure most people could tell you exactly what that means.

Marc: All right. Because we like to be sciencey here. So, a microwave is a radio wave with a short wavelength, somewhere between about a millimeter and a third of a meter. That feels like a pretty big range for, you know, being, you know, but whatever. The ones in the kitchen oven are about 12 centimeters long. So, you know, half a foot in freedom units, which works out at a frequency of 2.45 gigahertz. So the electric field in the oven swings back and forth about two and a half billion times a second. A water molecule has a slightly positive end and a slightly negative end. So every time the field swings, the molecule tries to turn and line up with it. And it can't keep up perfectly because it's doing it 2.4 billion times a second. And all of that turning and jostling against its neighbors turns into heat. Because, you know, when molecules bounce around, they heat up. The technical name is dielectric heating. The waves get a few centimeters into the food and anything deeper warms up the ordinary way just by, you know, heat spreading. In from the outer layer, just the same as in a pan.

Renee: Am I remembering this right? Do you remember when we needed to connect the two buildings at cooking.com? And we knew we couldn't run any cables. Yes. And we're like, we can't tear up the driveway because it's not ours. And then we can't run a line because it's not our buildings. And so we picked microwave, didn't we?

Marc: It was. I don't know.

Renee: It was a microwave antenna.

Marc: Yes, technically it's a microwave antenna. Yes, yes. And it was at, I think, 2.45 gigahertz. Yes. Yeah. So any water that was, you know, happened to be, you know, blasting through at that moment, it would, except, except it was very low, like low power, you know, it wasn't like a microwave.

Renee: Well, yeah, I mean, it was just connecting to data points, right? And then every once in a while that squirrel would mess with it and then we would disconnect it.

Marc: I hated that thing. Everything would go off.

Renee: I hated that thing. We would get 300 notifications from 150 servers saying, I'm down, I'm up, I'm down, I'm up. Like, what is going on? Oh, I lost connectivity to the building I can look at and I'm getting it back? Like, that's not helpful. Yeah. Yeah, all right. Anyway, so let's talk about this. It starts in Berlin in 1940. The country was relying on radar to spot German bombers coming in over the channel. And the radar used radio waves several meters long, which meant enormous aerials and a fairly coarse picture.

Marc: Yeah, they're huge. Like the big old radio, they're giant. What changed that was the Magnetron. Like, that's such a cool, like, yeah, it's such a cool name.

Renee: I think it's very sci-fi.

Marc: Yeah, the Magnetron. The same part that makes the waves in your oven today. So it's a vacuum tube originally. We loved vacuum tubes. What the British would call a valve. Inside electrons spiral round in a magnetic field past a ring of cavities cut into a block of copper. And those cavities ring at microwave frequency. Much like blowing across the top of a bottle, you know, makes it sing like that flute sound. The working version was built at the University of Birmingham by two physicists, John Randall and Harry Boot. And they got it working on the 21st of February, 1940. It put out about 400 watts. Okay, so that's a lot. At a wavelength of around 10 centimeters. Radar works by sending out a pulse and listening for the echo. And the wavelength decides how big the aerial has to be and how sharp a picture you get. At 10 centimeters, a radar set could fit into the nose of an aircraft and pick out something as small as a submarine's periscope. The General Electric Company's research labs at Wembley in North London then turned Randall and Boot's lab device into something sturdy enough to manufacture.

Renee: The problem was, is Britain couldn't build enough of it. By the summer of 1940, France had fallen. The Battle of Britain was being fought overhead, and British factories were already stretched. The United States had factories and wasn't yet in the war. So the government sent a delegation led by Sir Henry Tizard, a senior scientist who chaired Britain's Committee on Air Defense, to hand over its most secret technology to America in return, oh my God, for American manufacturing. Tissot flew to Washington on the 22nd of August in 1940, and the rest of the team sailed on the Duchess of Richmond on the 13th and landed at Halifax in Nova Scotia on the 16th of December. One of the Magnatrons, number 12, traveled in a case carried by Kathy Bowen, a Welsh radar physicist. At Euston Station in London, a porter briefly made off with the case before Bowden got back. And in the U.S., Bell Labs tested it and confirmed it did what the British said, and the Massachusetts Institute for Technology set up the radiation laboratory to develop microwave radar around it. The American historian James Finney Baxter, in his 1946 History of Wartime Science, called it the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores. Oh, well, I mean, all because we really, really needed it and we could, our factories were bombed to death. We need your help. Like, hey, America, we're going to give this to you if you just help us build it. Like, how many times has that happened? Yeah. That was kind of a lot. Yeah.

Marc: I think, I mean, it was a big deal. I like that, you know, some porter could have taken off with it. That was, you know, well, I mean, it was a porter. Like, I'm sure he was going to put it on the train or the,

Renee: Probably, right? Like, it was sitting there. It was a case. Yeah, it was a case. Yeah, yeah.

Marc: Yeah. So making the magnetrons in volume fell largely to Raytheon. You know, they're still around. An electronics company outside of Boston. And in particular to the man who ran its power tube division. Oh, because remember, yeah, we still had power tubes. Percy Spencer. Each magnetron was being machined out of a solid block of copper. Oh, man. Which was slow and needed a skilled machinist Yeah Spencer changed it so the cavity shape was punched out of thin copper sheets And the sheets were stacked and soldered together Production went from a handful a day to 2,600 a day Wow, crazy And by the end of the war, Raytheon was making about 80% of all the magnetrons being built

Renee: That's it or if improvement is a good thing.

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: It works. Spencer's the reason the oven exists. He was born in 1894 in Howland, Maine. His father died when he was 18 months old. His mother gave him up to an aunt and uncle, and his uncle died when he was seven. Oh, dear Lord, my family has the exact same story.

Marc: Really? Wow. Yes.

Renee: Oh, my gosh. Okay. He left school at about 12 to work in a mill making the wooden spools that thread is wound on. He joined the U.S. Navy at 18 and taught himself radio math and science. And by the end of his career, he had somewhere between two and three hundred patents to his name.

Marc: Wow. Crazy. I was going to say, it did sound like your dad until the, you know, the patents.

Renee: My grandfather. Like, they were all like seven kids. And then mom dies of cancer. Dad dies of black lung. They all end up in an orphanage together in Pittsburgh when they should have all been in Harrisburg. Like, it's just a crazy story. The story of my grandfather and those kids, it's just a crazy story. Yeah.

Marc: Well, yeah. I'm sure your grandfather is, you know, wicked smart. Your dad, yeah, I like your dad. He's really smart, too. At the end of the story of the oven, and the story of the oven, sorry, as his company told it, is that he was standing next to a working magnetron and felt the candy bar in his pocket start to melt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You usually hear it as a chocolate bar. You know, there's different versions of the story. The earliest written version we could find in Reader's Digest in 1958 says it was a peanut bar, you know, so it's hard to know what it was. The same article says that he then sent out for popcorn kernels and held them near the magnetron and they popped all over the lab. And the next morning he put an egg in a kettle with a hole cut in the side and it burst in the face of a colleague who came to see. All of that comes out of one magazine article. So the company's version, you know, basically their version of the events. And what's on paper is the patent. You know, that's what we can see. So we don't know if, you know, if any of this stuff happened. But Raytheon filed it on the 8th of October, 1945, under the title. Oh, here's a good one. Method of treating foodstuffs. And it was granted in January 1950. The egg thing I've done the egg thing Yeah It's Yeah Interesting

Renee: So is he the first person to notice it?

Marc: Yeah Yeah, radar engineers had noticed it. In fairness, they had noticed the heat before him. Okay. All the way back at 1933 Chicago's, Chicago World's Fair, Westinghouse, the electrical company, cooked steaks between two metal plates using shortwave radio, which, you know, similar, not exactly the same, similar.

Renee: Right, right.

Marc: But that would be funny, two plates, two metal plates, and then they, you know,

Renee: Nuke the— We should do a YouTube channel where all we do is like myth busters of this crap. Like just all of this. Like, you know, like using an axe and like having the brakes actually work on the elevator. Like we should do all that stuff. Hang ourselves in our own contraption to get in and out of bed. I mean, it would be really interesting.

Marc: I think I'm okay with not building a magnetron and like melting stuff with it. Oh, well, right. Yeah. But what Spencer did was the first serious attempt to turn the effect into a product. Raytheon's first was the Raider Range, built by an engineer there called Marvin Bach. And it went on sale in 1947. Okay, here's where we talk about this. It's nearly six feet tall, weighed about 750 pounds, and cost around $5,000. It's so crazy. The magnetron ran so hot that it was water-cooled, so the oven had to be plumbed in.

Renee: So who on earth—who? Who bought a—I say this to you knowing people spend $38,000 on handbags. That's true. Who on earth bought a $5,000 oven that needed plumbing?

Marc: Okay, but $38,000 in today's money versus $5,000 in 1947 money. Like, it's a big difference. Yeah, but okay, so who would spend $5,000? restaurants railway dining cars oh yeah ocean liners oh

Renee: Those make sense.

Marc: Yeah where you need to feed a lot of people quickly in a small kitchen

Renee: For a home kitchen, it took another eight years. Raytheon licensed the technology to Tappan, an Ohio stove maker, and the first home microwave went on sale on the 25th of October, 1955, at $1,295. It sold 34 of them in the first year.

Marc: 34.

Renee: 34.

Marc: For that's just so well can you imagine 1295 dollars in 1955 like

Renee: No you'd have got another tv before you got a microwave you'd be like you know what no.

Marc: I i didn't look up like comparative like what else cost around 1295 dollars but like surely like a car you know

Renee: You want me to look it up i'll look it up hang on you keep talking i'll look it up.

Marc: It's just i mean there's a lot that's a lot. All right. So it got into ordinary houses once it was small enough to plug into the wall. In 1965, Raytheon bought Amana, an Iowa company that made fridges and freezers. So it had a brand that already sold to households. In 1967, Amana put out a countertop radar range that ran off of an ordinary wall socket. See, to me, that's the trick right there. And it was for $495. That's a massive drop down from, you know, 1900 or whatever it was, 1,295. The same year Litton, another American defense electronics company, showed a design with a reshaped cavity that wouldn't destroy itself if somebody switched it on empty, which is something early Evans didn't survive. In Japan, Sharp had been selling commercial microwaves since about 1962, and in 1966, it brought out the first one that had a turntable on it. Which is kind of cool.

Renee: Yeah, and Japanese households took to it faster than American ones. By 1976, about 17% of Japanese homes had a microwave against about 4% in the U.S. Then the American numbers take off, which is because Japan lives in the future. And can I just tell you what cost $1,200 in 1955?

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: A brand new, a brand new, just rolled off the line, Harley Davidson.

Marc: I mean like a microwave or a harley you know like yeah

Renee: A crazy thirteen hundred dollar purchase in 1955 was a major investment about 31 of a typical yearly household income.

Marc: That's see that's just crazy

Renee: For a microwave.

Marc: I know for no wonder only 34 sold

Renee: There you go there you go that was the 1% saying, I'll take that. Yeah.

Marc: American sales went from about $40,000 a year to $1 million a year in 1975, which is the year microwave ovens outsold gas ranges in the U.S. About a quarter, I mean, that's a long time, right? About a quarter of American homes had one by 1986, which is I think around where we got it. By 1996. Yeah. Yeah, it's a quarter. That's crazy.

Renee: I mean, that's the year I graduate high school. So I go through my entire life up to I graduate high school, and only one in four American families have a microwave. Yeah.

Marc: By 1997, it was about 90%, and the average oven cost around $200. The government's energy survey in 2015 put it at 96% of homes. So quite a climb.

Renee: Well, and here's what happened. People stopped thinking about it as a luxury. In 1996, the Kew Research Center asked Americans whether a microwave was a luxury or a necessity, and 32% said a necessity. Ten years later, that was 68%. The frequency was decided by committee. In 1947, the International Telecommunications Union and the United Nations body that shares out the radio spectrum held a conference in Atlantic City. Oh, oh, like when it, like in 1947, that was Atlantic City's heyday. I bet it was pretty rad. The U.S. asked for a band of frequencies around 2,450 megahertz to be set aside for industrial, scientific, and medical uses. Now, that's what's now called the ISM band. And one of those uses its delegate gave was an electronic cooker on ships and airplanes. Decades later, where we're at now, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth were put in the same band. So an old oven that leaks a little can knock out the Wi-Fi in the same room while it's running. It can reach a lot further than the next room, too. The Parkes Radio Telescope, a big dish in New South Wales, Australia, was being used to hunt for fast radio, bursts, very short flashes of radio energy that come from deep space. From 1998 onwards, it also kept picking up different kinds of short bursts that didn't look like it came from space at all, like 46 of them. And astronomers called them peritons. So in 2015, a team led by Emily Petroff, an astronomer at Swinsburg University in Melbourne, worked out what they were. When somebody opened a microwave door before the timer finished... The magnetron came off a burst at about 1.4 gigahertz as it powered down, which in the band the telescope was listening to, and it got out through the open door, right? So that thing got out through the open door. So think about that. I open the door before it dings, and some radio telescope somewhere down the road is like, oh, my God, it's aliens. No, no. It's a microwave door.

Marc: It was the intern opening the door for the coffee.

Renee: The two ovens responsible were both more than 27 years old, one at the staff kitchen and one in the visitor's center. And the bursts bunched up around lunchtime. Can you imagine? Like you're looking at the dashboard. You're like, why every day at between 12 and 1245 does this happen in these two like scopes? It's like, oh, my God, here's a direct line from that to the microwave.

Marc: Isn't that cool i thought you'd like that story

Renee: There's a photon in the lunchroom think about that for a minute all right a quasar in the lunchroom cheers.

Marc: I could just see because radio you know you're gonna telescope is it's not

Renee: Exactly you go you go visit if you go visit the very large array okay first of all you should go visit the very large array. I've been there like five times. It's really fun. Like if you want to go, call me, I'll take you. So anyway, you go there and the first thing they tell you is turn off your cell phone. Like you turn it off. You don't, it's not airplane mode. It's not, you just turn it off.

Marc: You have to turn it off.

Renee: Yeah. So as you're coming down and it's an open cow pasture. So there's cow crap everywhere, like everywhere around every scope. It's just mounds of it. I don't know if it absorbs, who knows, but it's an open range. So yeah, there's cows everywhere, Cattle everywhere. But, yeah, that's one of the things you do the second you get there is, like, you just turn all the electrical stuff you have. Just turn it off because you really are interfering with that bandwidth. It's a very large array.

Marc: Like some dude just sitting there, you know, and then every time at lunchtime, it goes and peaks off, like, hit the records.

Renee: It was probably his hot pocket, too. He probably hit start, walked away, came back and thought, I don't want my hot pocket to be too hot. Opened it and then chewed. Oh, my God. Look. What? Now his hot pocket's cold. Yeah. See how it works.

Marc: All right. So, anyways, inside the oven itself, microwaves bounce around the metal box and set up what are called standing waves. Fixed patterns where the energy piles up in some spots and almost cancels out in others. That's where the hot and cold patches in your leftovers come from. And the turntable is there to keep moving the food through them. Some ovens use a stirrer, a little fan-shaped metal paddle in the roof to keep moving the waves instead. I know, I've seen that, like, one time.

Renee: I've never seen that ever, but I've only ever looked at my own.

Marc: Yeah, really big ones. The door has metal mesh because the holes in it are a millimeter or two across, and the waves are about 12 centimeters long, so the light gets out through and the waves stay inside. And metal sparks because a sharp edge or a point concentrates the electric charge until the air next to it breaks down.

Renee: The early ovens did leak. I know, don't be afraid. You don't have one now. A study at Walter Reed, the U.S. Army Hospital in Washington, found a lot of oglins leaking microwave energy. Congress passed the Radiation Control for Health and Safety Act in 1968. I swear to you, like the 70s were like the best for like, we care about people. The Food and Drug Administration set a federal standard for every oven made after the 6th of October in 1971. A new oven can leak no more than one milliwatt per square centimeter, measured about five centimeters from the surface, and no more than five over its working life. Pacemakers were another real concern. The pacemaker of the 70s and the early 80s weren't shielded. A leaking oven could interfere with them, and warning signs went up in places where microwaves were in use. I remember that. Like, don't use this if you have a pacemaker. Like, I remember that. Modern pacemakers shielded against it. Like, thank God for that, because clearly they weren't going to fix the microwave, so they had to fix the thing in your heart.

Marc: I just like that it's, you know, yes, things were leaking. Yes, there was regulation that changed that. And, like, nothing that's rolling off the production line today is leaking. But people are still afraid of their microwaves, you know?

Renee: Yeah, well, they're afraid of their cell phones, too. and I don't... The internet doesn't help. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, the internet just does not help for people who have... Batboy. Yeah. Yeah, right? Like, that are prone to that kind of thing. Like, I'm a hypochondriac. But then, you know, but then... I won't say it. But then there are places where... Like, my mom. My mom said... So my mom worked at this hospital. And this hospital had an x-ray machine. That x-ray machine leaked. And my mom said, anybody who worked on that floor and had an office, because there were offices like right down like next to it, right? And you're only separated by a fake wall. It's not a real wall. It's a fake wall, right? And it was leaking. She's like, every person that ever sat in that office right outside of that.

Marc: Got cancer.

Renee: Every single one of them got cancer. Every single one. My aunt got it because she worked on that floor for six months. She got cancer. Like it was, my mom's like, it was crazy. and it was one old machine that was leaking radiation. That's all it took.

Marc: Well, that's what we're going to talk about next.

Renee: Okay, so do it.

Marc: Yeah, microwaves are a different kind of radiation from x-rays. X-rays and gamma rays carry enough energy to knock electrons off atoms, which is what creates the free radicals and stuff. And that's how you can damage DNA. Microwaves don't carry anywhere near that much energy per photon. All they can do is make molecules move, which is heat. The injuries that actually happen with microwaves are usually burns. The best known is superheated water, where water heated in a smooth cup goes past boiling without bubbling and then erupts when you move it or you drop something on it.

Renee: Oh, that's true. And then there are stories that get passed down that aren't true. I just want to put the PJ story is true. It happened. He lit his hair on fire. The first was that the Soviet Union banned microwave ovens in 1976 because they were so dangerous. That acclaim goes back to an article from 1998 that doesn't give a source for it. And the Soviet Union was, in fact, developing and making its own microwave ovens. People may be mixing that up with the Soviets aiming microwave transmissions at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow during the Cold War, which really did happen. Oh, they're still doing, they call it Havana sickness, right? It's just microwave pointed at people. Like, yeah, you guys, it's still happening. And it was happening all the way back in, you know, 1998. The second is that microwaving food destroys its nutrients. Cooking does break down some vitamins, but the things that destroy them are long cooking times and lots of water. And microwaving tends to be quick and it uses very little water. So Harvard's medical school says it often keeps more of the nutrients than actually boiling it. And the third is a school science fair project that went around by email claiming that the water boiled in microwaves and cooled down, killed a house plant. McGillius University Office of Sciences Society looked at people's attempts to repeat it, and they found no difference. You can't kill a houseplant with microwaved water.

Marc: It's just water. It's still just water.

Renee: Yeah, you didn't change the chemical properties of it simply by boiling it and then letting it cool. Yeah, well, again, this is ridiculous stuff even before the Internet. I know. We just really liked, if it's new and we can't explain it, it's dangerous and we're fearful. That's fair.

Marc: I mean, it seems like it's a magic box, right? You know, you put something cold in, you press the button and it comes out hot. Like, that's freaking magic, you know?

Renee: Right? Right. Just like you type in something into a chat box and then bam, you know everything there is to know about everything. Like, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Marc: There's one more rumor that I've heard from people who know some physics, which is that 2.45 gigahertz was picked because it's the natural frequency of a water molecule. The frequency that water resonates at. Liquid water absorbs microwaves across a very wide range, and it absorbs most strongly at frequencies around 10 times higher than an oven uses. At that peak, nearly all the energy would be soaked up in the outer skin of the food. So you'd burn the outside and leave the middle cold. 2.45 gigahertz gets a few centimeters of the food. And it was the band, the 1947 conference had set aside. It isn't the resonant frequency of water.

Renee: The food industry rebuilt the whole product line around this oven. Swanson, the frozen food company, sold its first TV dinner in 1953 in an aluminum tray. And you can't put aluminum in a... One more time, people. You can't put aluminum in a microwave. So in 1986, Swanson... Go ahead. God dare you. Go ahead. Put a ding dong. Go ahead. Heat it up. Don't take it out of the wrapper. Just put it in a microwave. Oh, dear Lord. Don't send an email when you're done with that either. There's a story that the TV dinner was embedded by a Swanson salesman called Jerry Thomas, who used up a surplus of Thanksgiving turkey. And the Swanson family and the company's own staff disputed it. And he later admitted he kind of embellished it. But this is a good point, right? Like all the frozen food TV dinners we had up until that point were in like metal trays. I bet if you ask Sam, you ask Sam right now. Does he miss that? Does he miss the metal tray with the apple cobbler that got so hot it was like lava and you couldn't eat it?

Marc: I remember that stuff, man. I remember that.

Renee: He would say yes, he misses that.

Marc: Yes, of course. I ate a lot of that when I was a kid, man. Yes.

Renee: I remember that a lot. Salisbury steak.

Marc: Salisbury steak. Chicken parm.

Renee: No, it was, what was it? It was.

Marc: Yeah. The one that was popular for me was fried chicken with mashed potatoes and corn with the apple lava.

Renee: Yeah, with the apple lava. Yeah.

Marc: Yeah, yeah.

Renee: Oh, wow. Anyway, so Jerry said he came up with it, although the company disputes it, and Jerry said he lied. So there we are.

Marc: There we go. Yeah. I remember the transition from metal to plastic, though. It was yeah that was pretty cool

Renee: I remember the first time i saw a chicken pot pie in a paper container and it still got crispy in the microwave like that was like that's.

Marc: That's cool or remember the what was it those you had you put the the like that sleeve over over the thing to make it

Renee: Yeah yeah to make it yeah to make it crispy to make it crisp up yeah yeah that's how you could do deep dish pizza in the microwave.

Marc: Yeah yeah you put it in the

Renee: Little sleeve or something yeah.

Marc: Microwave popcorn followed. General Mills, the cereal company, got a patent on a microwave popcorn bag in 1981. And by the middle of the 80s, there were shelf-stable brands in every supermarket. Hot Pockets came out in 1983, made by a company called Chef America, started by two brothers, Paul and David Barrage. And Nestle bought the company in 2002 for $2.6 billion. Dang, Hot Pockets. That was worth a lot. What? A whole category of food was being designed to be cooked in one specific appliance.

Renee: So, if you ask me, like, growing up, I don't remember, like, hot dogs and crap like that is what we used to cook in there, you know, just because it was easy. And I would never put my bun in. I would cook my hot dog in it, like, score the top of the hot dog with crazy designs, right? Then you put it in there and you just cook it for, like, two minutes, but then the hot dog would bend some crazy way because you scored the crap out of the front end of it and did nothing to the back end of it, so now it's all bent weird. And then you would take that bent weird but like kind of hard on the ends hot dog and stick it into a fresh bun because you know who wants a hard bun too i mean that's what i remember doing with that stuff and like popcorn yeah i think later in life right later in life like living in california, have a teeny tiny microwave like that by that time it's lean cuisine man it's like lean cuisine and the microwave got me through probably the early 90s like for real like like you know they chicken and rice and the, spaghetti and uh and the turkey dinners like yeah lean cuisine but that's like you said to me like why do i need to own a microwave lean cuisine is why i need to own a microwave.

Marc: Yeah i remember lean cuisine weight watchers you know all that

Renee: Stuff yeah yeah and link and you just you put it's like everything else you cook you poke the holes in the top you stick it in for two minutes like bam it's done like it's all the same yeah yes i want more of that in my life. Well, okay, so let's talk about this. Making some of it, made workers ill at a popcorn plant in Jasper, Missouri, run by a company called Gisler Mary Lee. Oh, doesn't it sound like it's so benign? Eight former workers developed a disease called broncholitis. Obliterates. Obliterates. I don't know. Oh, wait, this is popcorn lung.

Marc: Yes, exactly.

Renee: Yeah, between 1992 and 2000, it scars the smallest airways in the lungs. That's terrible. Mine are all scarred, but I'm an asthmatic. I don't think that would be terrible. if you did it to yourself on purpose. I didn't do it to myself on purpose. And some of those workers needed lung transplants. The National Institutes for Occupational Safety and Health, the federal agency that researches workplace health, traced it to a chemical called diacetyl in the artificial butter flavoring. It got the nickname popcorn lung.

Marc: Yep, popcorn. You're right. You're right on top of it.

Renee: You knew exactly what it was. I remember that. I remember keep thinking like, oh my God, do you know how much people how much people are exposed to that butter stuff in popcorn. I mean, you work in a theater for 10 years, you were exposed to it. You know, like you work in the factory that created it, you were exposed to it. Like, that's crazy. The oven also got drawn into a bigger argument about who does the cooking. In 1993, two British sociologists, Cynthia Cockburn and Susan, Ormrod, published a book called Gender and Technology in the Making, and they followed the microwave from the men who engineered it to the way it was marketed as a kitchen product for women. There's also a claim you hear a lot that the microwave killed the family dinner because everyone could heat up their own food at their own time. That's an argument people have made, but, you know, no one's measured it. Here's, here, here. When the kids worked in the factories back at the turn of the century, they marketed Jell-O as something a two-year-old could make. It's what we do. It's literally what we do. Right? And so, you know, in the name of, like, mom and dad in the workplace and kids being home to cook after lunch and their own dinner. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it wasn't so mom could have a better day off. It's because mom's in the workplace and there's no one home to cook and stoves are dangerous. Right? Wow, wow.

Marc: Microwaves are safe unless you're PJ.

Renee: Unless you're PJ. And in PJ's defense, he didn't want to burn down the house, and instead he burned down his head. I don't...

Marc: That's, hey, you know,

Renee: It's good. Good for PJ. He saved us all and sacrificed his own hair in the process.

Marc: If we all had a PJ.

Renee: I'm right, if only. Yeah.

Marc: The inside of a microwave oven is barely changed. The one on your counter today is still a magnetron firing into a metal box, which is the same basic design as the countertop Amana in 1967. And the global market is worth about $13 billion a year. That's a lot. The change that's been promised for a long time is to replace the magnetron excuse me, with transistors, which the industry calls solid-state cooking. Magnetron is either on or off, and when it's on, it puts out one frequency at full power. So when you set an oven to 50%, it switches the magnetron on and off. A transistor amplifier can be set to an exact power and an exact frequency and can change both while it's cooking. So in principle, it can put the energy where it's needed. NXP, the Dutch chip maker, and Whirlpool, the American appliance maker, were among the companies that formed an industry group to push it. Miele, the German appliance maker, brought out an oven using it in 2017. They called the Dialog at 7,000, oh my gosh, 7,990 euros. Nobody has made a mass market one since.

Renee: Here's the thing the person who can afford that doesn't cook for themselves so why do they want to make the cook's job any easier they don't.

Marc: But like okay yeah it's cool like the technology is cool I get that but yeah Like, what is it doing?

Renee: Hermes should sell one. It's worthless, but it costs a lot.

Marc: Microwave by Chanel. Right? I mean, it doesn't really improve the overall experience like that much. I mean, nobody changes the power on their microwave setting, you know? They just hit full blast and go. Yep.

Renee: No, I take that fact. Sam does. He's in like four minutes on power three and then two minutes on power four and then one and a half minute on power one.

Marc: Yeah. Yes. But that's Sam.

Renee: That's Sam. Yeah, I know.

Marc: Everybody else at most will basically go two minutes, pull it out, stir it around and put it in for two minutes again, like full blast, baby. So anyways, yeah. At the cheap end of the market, combination ovens that do microwave grill and air fryer in one box are now sold at discount supermarkets. We had one at the other place that did – it was like a toaster oven and microwave at the same time, which is weird. It had metal in it. You'd think metal, but whatever.

Renee: Yeah, you did. Oh, okay.

Marc: But it did. It worked. Whatever.

Renee: Hey, you know the other thing being promised is cameras. Why? Why? At the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in the last couple of years, LG and Samsung have both shown microwave ovens with cameras inside that are supposed to recognize the food and set the cooking for you. That's the manufacturer's description. And those ovens are connected to the internet. So that's a camera inside a kitchen appliance that is perpetually online. Doing what? I don't know. Looking at who knows. Does it have batteries? Is it listening to like that is the craziest thing and by the way does it have buttons because when that camera quits working and it doesn't know what's in there am I still going to be able to configure it like this is the dumbest again again one more time does everything need to be connected to the internet no.

Marc: No no I should I should have put I should have taken this and not put it for you to

Renee: Read I know right like just it turned into a rant and I can't help myself not everything needs to be online and i'm like oh okay.

Marc: I could just see you know your samsung microwave you know with smart sense ai whatever and and you pop it in and then you didn't pay the subscription and so your microwave doesn't

Renee: Work there you go because i don't own it anymore i paid for that service by the month now, oh man like this is why i want to be an orca this is why knowing that orcas go through menopause, I still want to be an Orca. I still want to be an Orca.

Marc: Well, I think it's not as bad as some of the other appliances we've talked about.

Renee: Yeah, that's fair. Or a BMW. You got me on that.

Marc: All right. In 1940s, a magnetron was a secret carried across the Atlantic. In a case, one man wasn't supposed to let out of his sight. By the end of the war, Raytheon was making $2,600 of them a day. In 1947, the oven built around one cost of $5,000 and went to ocean liners and dining cars. In 1967, it was $495 and plugged into a kitchen socket. I mean, that's a big change in 20 years. And by 1997, 30 years after that, it was $200 and 9 out of 10 American homes. Each step made it cheaper and smaller, and every time it got cheaper, it went somewhere new.

Renee: And when we did the MSG episode, we talked about Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin's character in 30 Rock, whose job pilot was vice president of East Coast Television and Microwave Oven Programming. Because in the show, NBC was owned by GE. When that aired, GE really did make microwave ovens. I think I have a GE oven. It also sold its whole appliance business in 2016 to hire a Chinese appliance maker for $5.6 billion. So GE is now a Chinese appliance maker.

Marc: There you go.

Renee: A once great American brand.

Marc: Yeah. If you remember the first microwave in your house or what you got put in it that shouldn't have, write to us at the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast at gmail.com.

Renee: This is the Nostalgic Nerds Podcast. Thanks for tuning in. Subscribe, follow, share this with someone who still stands back from the microwave while it's running. Seriously, stick a ding dong in there. Nothing bad will happen, I promise you. I don't promise you. It's going to explode.

Marc: Don't do it.

Renee: It will catch fire and explode. Don't do it.

Marc: I have to put like a disclaimer on this episode now.

Renee: We'll see you next time. Thanks, Mark.

Marc: Thanks. Yeah. Tom wrote, you're confusing messages and pigeons. Two million messages is 100 successful pigeons at 20,000 messages each. And then you might enjoy a short film during research on microfilm in the 1970s. So I went back into what you call it, the transcripts, and just to make sure that I wasn't...

Renee: I did. I was joking about it. I said, look, could you imagine that the skies were torqued with pigeons?

Marc: Yeah.

Renee: Yeah. I did joke about it.

Marc: Yeah, you joked about it, but we both didn't mean there were two million pigeons. We clearly meant there were thousands of pigeons carrying millions of messages.

Renee: So anyways. Right, right. Yeah.

Marc: But thank you to Tom.

Renee: Otherwise, the skies would be darkened with pigeons.

Marc: Yeah. Did you imagine? I know. That would be... I mean, you know, it was Paris. So it could have been dark

Renee: You don't see too many of those things anymore that's all I'm going to say you see it on the menu, you don't see them around the restaurant that's all I'm saying I'm just going to put that out.

Marc: There we're just digging a bigger hole here yeah, so anyways that's our shout out to Tom thank you Tom for keeping us on the street and narrow so