On October 25, 1955, the Tappan Stove Company announced to the press the release of the first microwave oven meant for home-kitchen use, and it was a dismal failure. It was the size of a regular convection oven and was meant to be built into a countertop or placed among cabinets in the kitchen. The marketers at the press event demonstrated that this new “electric oven,” as it was called, could cook eggs in twenty-two seconds, bacon in ninety seconds, and most impressively, a full roast in just thirty minutes. They explained that, miraculously, the oven itself stays completely cold when cooking is occurring, as do the plates and cookware, and likened the phenomenon to the way sunlight warms the skin but not the window it passes through. It was one of the greatest breakthroughs in the art of cooking ever seen, hailed one zealous and perhaps not culinarily-inclined reporter.
Americans weren’t buying into the hype, and in fact weren’t buying the ovens at all. One might expect that the people of America were wary of this new technology. It was only 59 years ago, but eons have passed in terms of technological advancement. In 1955, no one had seen a computer, transistor radios were just coming on the market, and here was an oven that cooked using “radar-waves” that bombarded the food to agitate the molecules into a warmer state. It would be completely reasonable to assume that microwaves took so long to catch on because Americans wouldn’t embrace this potentially dangerous technology, but this would also be an incomplete explanation, if not entirely wrong.
It was, simply put, a time more accepting of new and interesting technologies. The first man to discover that microwaves had heating applications was Percy Spencer, an engineer working for the Raytheon corporation to develop microwave communications technologies for the government. As the famous story goes, Spencer noticed that after standing next to an active radar that was generating microwaves, the candy bar in his pocket had completely melted. A completely normal reaction to this would have been to run away and warn others that if they weren’t careful around these poorly understood radar generators they might get cooked too. But, it was a different time, and Spencer, instead of yanking the plug out of the machine, ran to get some popcorn to see if that would cook too.
Raytheon was as bullish on the technology as Spencer had been. After patenting the application of microwaves to food, they set out to determine the commercial opportunities. The price was high at $5,000 for a Raytheon Radarange cooker (this was a just slightly less than the average going price for a new house at the time), which meant they would only be selling to restaurants and commercial kitchens. To promote the technology to the general public, Raytheon set up a vending machine in Grand Central Station that dispensed hot dogs that had been warmed with a built in microwave. Dubbed the “Speedy Weeny,” it promised to cook and dispense a hot dog in just 20 seconds, as well as provide a good chuckle to any passersby with even a hint of a childish sense of humor. Raytheon found people were willing to eat their speedy weenies, but they had no appetite for the price tag of an oven. The company decided to make it someone else’s problem and licensed their technology for household applications to the Tappan Stove Company.
When Tappan introduced their first consumer model in 1955, it was priced at $1,295 for a single unit. While this was a major improvement on Raytheon’s $5,000 version, it was still out of reach for most Americans, who could spend a hundred dollars more and buy themselves a new Ford. Prices wouldn’t come down far enough to make microwaves a viable purchase until the 1970’s, when they started their march into homes across the country. It is estimated that today over 90% of American homes have a microwave, which you can pick up for just $60 on Amazon. The microwave, for the first twenty years of its history, was a super-luxury item affordable only to those wealthy enough to have someone else preparing their food. Americans were not pining for a better way to cook a roast, but when one presented itself at a reasonable price, they were quick to adopt. Given the story of the microwave and the pace of technological growth, we can only imagine the things that will be commonplace twenty years from now that aren’t even on our radar today.