Inventions: Heat it up!

Other than a cold beer on a hot day, there's nothing quite like a hot meal on a cold day. Picture this: you've been at work all day. Your boss has given you a hard time. You missed a deadline. It's cold, and your car broke down on the way home. Your kids are already asleep when you arrive home because you're not there until 10 pm, and your wife is upset because obviously your job is more important than your family, and you missed the dinner she'd spent hours preparing. There's a note on the table telling you that it's in the fridge.

Well great, that's just great. Beau-ti-freakin'-ful.

Now really, there are only two things that could make this worse. The first is if the food was left on the counter collecting bacteria and you ate it and got food poisoning; but thankfully there's a brilliant appliance that stopped that from happening. The second is if you, cold to the bone and depressed, had to eat this delicious meal... cold. I shudder just thinking about it.

Enter: the microwave. You pull out the plate your wonderful wife prepared for you and pop it into the micro, and two minutes later you're eating a warm, life-rejuvenating plateful of love and pasta. Thank you microwaves! Thank you for uniformly exciting the water and other polarized molecules in my food, and providing me with an evenly warmed meal! With this warm belly-full of fuel providing you with a newfound zest for life, you march upstairs and really show your wife your appreciation. You fold all the laundry, match the socks properly, and put it all away.

Okay okay, this scene is perhaps a little dramatic. But dramatizations are used all the time to get the point across. The microwave is a time-saver, and in my opinion is one of the greatest inventions of the 20th century.


(just in case the other 10 are in use...)

Sure, I could have preheat the oven for 15 minutes and then spent another 20 minutes waiting for my food to get warm. Or I could've put it in a pan and heated it on the stovetop. But these things would have taken valuable minutes and I may not have had the energy left to fold the laundry. Not to mention what a massive waste of energy it would've been to waste all of that heat to warm only a single dish!

Like many good inventions, the microwave was invented accidently. In 1945, while working on making radar devices for Raytheon, Percy Spencer noticed that the chocolate bar in his pocket started to melt. He then used the device to pop popcorn, and then to cook an egg (which exploded in the face of one of the experimenters). From there, he build a metal box which he shot the microwaves into, and when he placed food in it he found the temperature of the food rose rapidly. After this, Raytheon got a patent, and created both commercial and home-use microwaves, which were copied by many other companies, and the devices sold like hot-cakes (*groan*).

As is the case with many technologies, the microwave has suffered from a serious degredation of usability in many cases. 20 years ago, the microwave interface was very simple: put your food inside, set the time, and start the microwave. Now, although there are still a number of simple and usable interfaces, there are an alarming number of microwaves that come with 100 page manuals and require a rocket science degree to get working. Buttons for everything from reheating a 3 pound plate of leftovers to boiling water exist on the surfaces. These don't really improve the usability of the microwave: in fact, often the additional complexity just frustrates users. I'm hopeful that in time we will see the microwave interface return to it's original simplicity. After all, the point is to save us time.