Percy Spencer (1894-1970) was orphaned at a young age and never finished grammar school. His natural curiosity and long nights studying calculus, physics, metallurgy and chemistry led to a job at a new company in Cambridge called Raytheon.
Percy was instrumental in designing radar systems used during World War II, and was credited with many of the Raytheon’s biggest breakthrough inventions. Legend has it, that Percy got the idea for a microwave oven when he noticed that the microwaves he was studying had melted the peanut bar in his pocket into a gooey mess.
Percy’s U.S. Pat. 2,495,429 claims the basic process of heating food with microwaves within a restricted space. Other Raytheon employees, however, contributed critical technology such as Marvin Bock’s invention of a mechanism to shut off the microwave power when the oven is empty of food, U.S. Pat. 2,516,503, entitled “Controlling Device for Cooking Apparatus.”
“When you work nights you think nobody cares what you do. I know; I used to be there.”
P.L. Spencer
The first commercially viable microwave oven was marketed to restaurants as the “Radarange” in 1946. The first consumer microwave oven, the Tappan RL-1, was made under license and sold 1955 for $1,295, or about $12,000 in today’s dollars.