When Radar Waves Cooked Lunch
Rea,
Energy waves are all around us, even though we can’t always see them. When you turn on a light bulb, it gives off waves you can see as light, but it also makes invisible heat waves you can feel with your hand. These invisible waves have enough energy to warm things up.
In 1945, Percy Spencer was working with radar, which makes powerful invisible energy waves like the heat from a light bulb. While testing the radar, he noticed something strange in his pocket: his chocolate bar had turned into a warm, gooey mess! These invisible radar waves had enough energy to melt the chocolate.
Spencer was different from most people. As a self-taught engineer who never finished high school, he had learned to pay attention to unexpected things. Instead of just cleaning up the mess, he wondered: if these invisible waves could melt chocolate, what else could they do?
The next day, Spencer brought popcorn kernels to work. He pointed the radar’s energy waves at them, and suddenly pop-pop-pop! Kernels exploded into fluffy popcorn, flying all over the room! The energy waves were making the molecules in the food move so fast they heated up, just like when the sun warms your skin.
Spencer kept experimenting with different foods. The invisible waves could cook an egg in seconds and heat a sandwich in under a minute. He realized he had found a whole new way to cook food using energy waves.
Spencer turned his discovery into the first microwave oven. It was as tall as a refrigerator and weighed 750 pounds. In 1947, it cost $5,000 - that’s about $50,000 today! Only fancy restaurants could buy them. But over time, engineers made them smaller, safer, and less expensive.
Today, we use these same energy waves to heat up our food in minutes. What started with a melted chocolate bar changed how we cook forever. Spencer showed that sometimes the best discoveries come from paying attention to life’s little mysteries and asking “why did that happen?”
Love, Abba
P.S. Next time you use the microwave, think about those invisible energy waves making the molecules in your food dance faster and faster until they heat up!
