Percy Spencer and the 1st Radarange
October 8, 1945, 80 years ago: The Raytheon Company, one of America's largest defense contractors, files an application for 2 U.S. patents: For a microwave cooking process, and an oven that heats food using microwave energy from a magnetron.
The process was one of many "great discoveries" that have been made by accident. Percy Spencer, a 51-year-old engineer, was employed by Raytheon, assigned to the Radiation Laboratory (or "Rad Lab") at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, across the Charles River from Boston. He noticed that microwaves from an active radar set he was working on started to melt a Mr. Goodbar candy bar that he had in his pocket.
The first food deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave oven was popcorn, and the second was an egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters. However, the expression "egg on your face," meaning an embarrassment, had already been in wide use for about 50 years.
In 1947, Raytheon built the "Radarange," the 1st commercially available microwave oven. It was almost 6 feet tall, weighed 750 pounds, and cost about $5,000 -- about $89,000 in 2025 money. It consumed 3 kilowatts, about 3 times as much as today's microwave ovens, and was water-cooled. The name was the winning entry in an employee contest. As with every other new machine on the market, the device would eventually get smaller and cheaper, and sell better.
Percy Spencer lived until 1970, age 76. In 2020, The Raytheon Company changed its name to Raytheon Technologies Corporation. In 2023, they changed their name again, to RTX Corporation. They remain headquartered in Arlington, Virginia, across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C.
In 1985, Sid Caesar revived his "Professor" character to do a commercial for Saran Wrap. He said, "Saran Wrap was designed for the microwave!" The offscreen announcer said, "But Saran Wrap came before the microwave. How did they know?" Sid said, "I don't know, but they knew!" Technically, whoever wrote the commercial was right: Although S.C. Johnson & Son Co. discovered polyvinylidene chloride the material that became Saran Wrap -- also by accident -- in 1933, they didn't market it as Saran Wrap until 1949.
Similarly, in 2021, singer Paul Anka competed on the Fox TV series The Masked Singer as "Broccoli," and one of his clues was that he was, unlike most of the show's performers, older than the microwave oven. This was true: He was born in 1941.
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