The first food
deliberately cooked with Spencer's microwave was popcorn, and the second was an
egg, which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters.
The
match-made-in-heaven union between popcorn and microwaves goes way back. Way
back, in fact, to the very beginning of microwave ovens in the first place.
The first
foodstuff to ever be microwaved was chocolate when an engineer at the Raytheon
Corporation, Percy Spencer, was working on an active radar set and happened to
have a chocolate bar in his lab coat. The microwave radiation from the radar
equipment melted the chocolate and on that fateful day in 1945 the idea for
microwave cooking was born.
Spencer set up a
prototype of the first microwave oven and promptly kicked off the link between
popcorn and microwaves forever by throwing some popcorn into the device, making
popcorn the first intentionally microwaved food. Needless to say, the popcorn
experiment went much better than the follow up experiment which involved
microwaving a whole egg (which promptly exploded in the face of one of the
experimenters).
Within two years,
commercial microwave ovens were on the market (albeit at an enormous cost equivalent
to $53,000 in today’s dollars) and by the end of the 1960s, more compact and
economical models began appearing in homes. By the mid-1980s, approximately 25
percent of American homes had a microwave and by the end of the 1990s it had
reached over 90 percent.
