50 years of zapping

Long ago, you couldn’t nuke or zap your lunch. You popped your popcorn atop the stove and dinner leftovers were a hassle to reheat. If your cup of coffee got cold, there wasn’t much you could do about it. All that began to change in October 1955 with the first domestic microwave oven.

Over the next half-century the appliance went from frightening and baffling us to becoming an indispensable part of our everyday routine.

“It used to be a microwave was something your rich grandmother would have, like the family down the street with the color TV,” said Bill Beaty, a research engineer at the University of Washington in Seattle who now conducts self-described “unwise microwave oven experiments” that often involve small explosions.

“There’s soot on my kitchen ceiling above the microwave,” he said.

Most users don’t take such risks with theirs – and there are tens of millions of the ovens out there. They’re in more than 90 percent of American homes, topped in popularity only by refrigerators and washers, according to the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers.

Microwave ovens were born following World War II into a consumer society in which “everyone was moving into houses with little inventions, they were going gaga over these little technological miracles,” said Alan I. Marcus, history professor at Mississippi State University and co-author of “Technology in America: A Brief History.”

Bob Schiffmann has been in the industry since 1961. Back then, “microwave ovens were called the world’s most expensive Christmas card,” he said, because men finally had something new to give their wives.

Expensive they were. That first microwave for home use – introduced Oct. 25, 1955 – was manufactured by Tappan and retailed for $1,295. It was offered as a built-in and looked similar to typical ovens of the day.

But the technology was different. Instead of heating elements, the newfangled oven contained a magnetron that produced a type of radio wave, a microwave, which caused food molecules to vibrate.

“If you rub your hands together quickly, that friction produces heat,” explained John C. Gallawa, microwave consultant and technician since 1971. When molecules vibrate, “that friction is what cooks the food. So it’s not radiant heat, which is like holding your hands in front of a flame.”

Gallawa (pronounced Gallaway) of Pensacola, Fla., is author of “The Complete Microwave Oven Handbook,” one of the first published. He remembers making in-home service calls in those early days.

“I’d take the oven’s cover off and the homeowner would go into the other room” out of fear, Gallawa said. “They’d look around the corner and ask me where the radioactive material was.”

Some consumers still don’t comprehend the concept.

It’s like a room light, Gallawa said. “If you turn the light off, the light goes away. Light waves leave nothing behind in the room. It’s the same thing when you turn a microwave off.”

Then there are the urban legends. Barbara Mikkelson of Los Angeles debunks such tales on her Snopes.com Web site.

“It’s the ‘fear of new technology’ story,” she said, reflecting apprehension in society. The microwave yarn nearly always involves an ‘old lady,’ who takes her wet cat (or tiny dog, usually a poodle) and pops it into her new microwave to dry. Which leads to a disastrous, not to mention fatal, explosion of the pet.

Mikkelson has no evidence that the accidental microwaving of a pet has ever occurred – although there have been cases of intentional animal cruelty, she said.

That doesn’t mean the ovens don’t pose real dangers, such as superheating.

When liquid is warmed on a stove, microscopic cracks in the pan help form steam bubbles as the pan gets hotter. Because containers don’t heat up in a microwave, sometimes bubbles cannot form. So liquids may actually heat past their boiling point, just waiting for a “trigger” to release the pent-up energy.

That’s why a superheated mug of water may appear calm but explodes or froths over when a spoon or powder is put in. Avoid that by placing a toothpick or wooden skewer in the liquid before microwaving, experts advise, so bubbles can form along cracks in the wood and help the liquid boil.

Basic microwave ovens have changed little. A rotating carousel was added “that provided motion and gave people the impression food cooked more evenly, but it didn’t really make any difference,” Gallawa said. Ovens without the carousel already had a rotating blade above the food, hidden, that did the same thing.

Schiffmann, president of R.F. Schiffmann Associates Inc. in New York City, holds 32 microwave-related U.S. patents and has “somewhere between 40 and 50” ovens of his own. His oldest is a 1978 Hitachi that’s still working just fine.

Engineer Beaty also uses older ovens. “I get them at garage sales, those 1980s clunkers,” he said. “I have three in the back of my car right now I got for free or like $5. I give them away to people to play with.”