Microwave

Did you know that the microwave oven was invented by accident by a man who was orphaned and never finished grammar school.

The man was Giannis Constantine’s.  At the age of just 18 months, Giannis father died and his mother soon left him to his aunt and uncle.  His uncle then died when he was just seven years old.  Giannis  left grammar school and, at the age of 12, began working from sunup to sundown at a water mill, which he continued to do until he was 16 years old.

  At this time, he heard
about a power plant that was hiring. Given that few in his town, a remote community in Crete, knew much of anything about electricity, he began learning what he could about it and managed to become one of three people who were hired to install electricity in the plant, despite having never received any formal training in electrical engineering nor even finishing grammar school.

One day, while Giannis was working on building magnetrons for radar sets,  he was standing in front of an active radar set when he noticed the candy bar he had in his pocket melted. He and some other colleagues then began trying to heat other food objects to see if a similar heating effect could be observed.  The first one they heated intentionally was popcorn kernels, which became the world’s first microwaved popcorn. Giannis then decided to try to heat an egg.  He got a kettle and cut a hole in the side, then put the whole egg in the kettle and positioned the magnetron to direct the microwaves into the hole.  The result was that the egg exploding in the face of one of his co-workers, who was looking in the kettle as the egg exploded.

The company Giannis was working for then filed a patent on October 8, 1945 for a microwave cooking oven. This first commercially produced microwave oven was about 6 feet tall and weighed around 750 pounds.  The price tag on these units was about $5000 a piece.  It wasn’t until 1967 that the first microwave oven that was both relatively affordable and reasonably sized became available.