The First Food Ever Microwaved

The first food ever cooked by microwaves was a chocolate bar. This wasn’t on purpose. It happened in 1945 when a scientist working for Raytheon got too close to a room where radar was being tested. Radar was generated by magnetron tubes that produce a radio waves of a very small frequency—thus giving them the name microwave. Following this accidental (and messy) discovery, the scientists at Raytheon tried cooking other things, like popcorn (it worked!) and a raw egg in the shell (it exploded. I tried the same experiment when I was a teenager, not realizing that in doing so, I was standing on the shoulders of giants. I cleaned up the mess, but my mother still wasn’t happy about it.)

The first microwave ovens were sold commercially under the name Radarange, since they grew out of radar research. Early adopters paid over $2,000 for the first Radaranges, which is a lot for a microwave now; it was more or less two months’ household wage in 1947! Mostly they were used in commercial kitchens, in restaurants and cruise ships. In 1967, Raytheon paired up with the Amana Corporation and created a more affordable microwave, which sold for about $500. The price has come down since, as the microwave has moved from novelty luxury to a necessity. Or would you rather eat that leftover pizza cold?

The Radarange: so easy! So convenient!

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How the Lemon was Invented

Lemons How do you make a lemon? Silly question, isn’t it? You just take the seeds out of one and plant them, and wait for the tree to come up, right? That’s true, but it hasn’t always been that easy. Lemons today are a widely cultivated citrus fruit, with a flavor used in cuisines of countries where no lemon tree would ever grow. You might think that it was just a matter of ancient peoples finding the trees, enjoying their fruit and growing more of them, but that’s not true. The lemon is a human invention that’s maybe only a few thousand years old. The first lemons came from East Asia, possibly southern China or Burma. (These days, some prefer to refer to Burma as Myanmar . I’ll try to stay out of that controversy here and stick to fruit.) The exact date of the lemon’s first cultivation is not known, but scientists figure it’s been around for more than 4,000 years. The lemon is a cross breed of several fruits. One fruit is the bitter orange, best known in the west for

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Rick Moranis and Dave Thomas as cultural icons Bob and Doug McKenzie These days we often hear Canadians referred to as “Hosers”. It’s a strange word, and it sounds a little insulting, but it’s sometimes used more with affection than malice. Any such word is difficult to use correctly, especially if you don’t belong to the group the word describes. I can’t say I feel comfortable throwing the word around, myself, but I can offer a little information about it that might shed some light on what it means. First off: is it an insult? Yes… and no. The word hoser can be used as an insult or as a term of endearment; the variation hosehead , is certainly an insult. It’s a mild insult, meaning something like jerk or idiot or loser . Its origin is unclear, and there are several debatable etymologies of the word. One claims that it comes from the days before the zamboni was invented, when the losing team of an outdoor ice hockey game would have to hose down the rink in or

The Whoopie Cap

What can you do with your father’s old hats? If you were born after, say, 1955, the answer is probably “Not much.” Men were still wearing fedoras in the 1970s and 1980s, but by 1990, fashion had turned to the point where unless you were Indiana Jones, the hat didn’t look right. Some blame Jack Kennedy for starting it all, strutting around perfectly coiffed and bare-headed in the early 1960s. In 1953, Harry Truman, a haberdasher by trade, stepped out of office, and just eight years later we had a president who didn’t care for hats? The times, they were a-changin’. If you set the WABAC machine to the 1920s or 1930s (when Indiana Jones was supposed to have lived), you would see the fedora was still very much in style. Men just didn’t leave the house without a hat of some kind, and for what remained of the middle class, the fedora was the topper of choice. But like any other piece of clothing, hats wear out, too. When that happened, you’d just throw it away. Though if there were

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