The first microwave oven on sale weighed about 340 kilos.
Its inventor is generally considered to be Percy Spencer at Raytheon, a company that built radar tubes. Legend has it that a candy bar in his pocket melted while he stood in front of a radar set. Spencer tried it out: popcorn worked, and an egg exploded in a colleague's face.
Fits with this
Nº 036 · Technology
QR codes were invented for car parts.
Denso Wave developed them in 1994 to label vehicle parts. The code could be read faster than a barcode.
Illustration: Brdall · Public domain
Nº 098 · Technology
The Pringles can's inventor is partly buried in one.
Fredric Baur designed the tube for the stacked chips. After his death in 2008, some of his ashes went into a Pringles can.
