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Howland Maine

Percy Spencer Melts a Chocolate Bar, Invents the Microwave Oven

Percy Spencer had only a fifth-grade education, but that didn’t stop him from earning patents crucial to winning World War II – and to cooking dinner in minutes.

He was the fourth person hired at a new company called Raytheon in Cambridge, Mass. He had an itch to learn and the temper of a bull moose in mating season.

In a 1958 Reader’s Digest article, an MIT scientist suggested Spencer benefited from his lack of schooling:

The educated scientist knows many things won’t work. Percy doesn’t know what can’t be done.

Percy Spencer

Mainiac

Percy Spencer was born July 19, 1894, in Howland, Maine. His father died when he was 18 months old, and his mother sent him to live with his aunt and uncle. His uncle died when he was seven. Young Percy and his widowed aunt traveled around New England, earning money from her weaving and whatever odd job he could pick up.

He left school after the fifth grade and got a job in a spool factory when he was 12, working from sunrise to sundown.

At 16 he learned the owner of a paper mill planned to electrify the plant. Intrigued, Percy Spencer applied for one of three job openings as an electrician. He learned about electricity by studying at night and by trial and error.

In 1912 he read how wireless radio operators directed the ship Carpathia to rescue Titanic passengers.

He decided he wanted to be one so he joined the Navy, where he learned about radio technology. “I just got hold of a lot of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch at night,” he said. He also taught himself trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics, metallurgy and radio technology.

The Navy discharged him honorably at the end of World War I.

Raytheon

Vannevar Bush and Laurence Marshall, two engineers who’d roomed together at Tufts University, had started the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, Mass. They aimed to manufacture a refrigerator with no moving parts. The idea didn’t work, so in 1924 they decided to make S gas rectifier vacuum tubes invented by Charles G. Smith, their first employee. The rectifier tube eliminated the need for two batteries to operate a radio. The tubes transformed radios into affordable household appliances from complicated hobbyist experiments. Soon, every home had to have one.

In August 1924 Marshall and Bush renamed the company Raytheon, a portmanteau word meaning ‘beam of light from the gods.’ The company would eventually move to an old button factory in Waltham, Mass.

Percy Spencer was hired as Raytheon’s fourth employee in 1925. He went to work making vacuum tubes. By 1939, he was a top-flight expert in vacuum tube design. He was so adept at it he “could make a working tube out of a sardine can,” said a Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist.

Magnetrons

Spencer did a lot for Raytheon. His expertise in radio tubes helped win a government contract to produce radar combat equipment for MIT’s Radiation Laboratory. A priority for the military was the production of magnetrons, which generated the radio signals used in radar.

Raytheon was producing 17 magnetrons a day. Percy Spencer figured it was faster to stamp and solder magnetron parts than to machine them, and production rose to 2,600 a day. Raytheon produced 80 percent of the magnetron tubes used in U.S. and British radar during the war. U.S. bombers were equipped with his radar sets, powerful enough to spot U-boat periscopes from the air.

During World War II, Spencer’s staff at Raytheon increased to 5,000 from 15. For his work, the Navy awarded him the Distinguished Public Service Award.

Percy Spencer Pops Popcorn

An early microwave oven.

One day at work in 1945 Spencer was standing next to an active magnetron when a candy bar in his pocket melted.

Intrigued, he sent out for unpopped popcorn. When it popped in front of the magnetron, he realized that microwaves could cook food.

From there he went on to develop the microwave oven by adding a high density electromagnetic field generator to an enclosed metal box.

The first microwave oven was 5’6” tall, weighed 750 pounds and cost as much as $3,000. It was too big, too expensive and too scary for consumers to use, but found its way to restaurants, railroad cars and ocean liners.

Commercial Failure

“The early microwave ovens, and we had one, were as large as a refrigerator, would take twenty minutes to warm up before you could cook anything, but they were 10 times more powerful than anything you can buy today, so a potato was cooked in thirty seconds,” said Rod Spencer, Percy’s grandson.

Percy Spencer insisted Raytheon’s chef cook with the oven. But its shortcomings were evident: It didn’t brown meat or crisp French fries. The cook quit.

“The microwave oven eventually became known as Raytheon’s largest commercial failure, and the reason why was that like so many other failures, they saw the cool technology but they didn’t understand the market,” Rod Spencer said.

Ad for a microwave oven, ca 1959

Microwave ovens eventually shrunk down to countertop size. In 1967 the first relatively affordable microwave oven went for sale at $495. By 1975 more sold than gas ranges.

Percy Spencer received $2 for his patent for a microwave oven – the gratuity Raytheon awarded all employees for patents obtained by the company. Over his lifetime, the lightly educated orphan from Maine earned 300 patents.

Percy Spencer died Sept. 8, 1970.

This story about Percy Spencer was updated in 2023. Image of 1974 microwave By Pamperchu – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=39958329.

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Hercules Had It Easy Compared to the Great 1938 Hurricane Tree Cleanup

The Great 1938 Hurricane blew down so many trees that paper mills were still processing them nine years later. Trees downed by the hurricane could still be seen in 1951.

Tree damage in the Boston area from the 1938 Hurricane. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

Comparable to Hurricane Katrina, the 1938 Hurricane struck on Sept. 21, 1938. The most powerful storm to make landfall in the Northeast in 200 years, it killed nearly 700 people and destroyed 19,000 buildings and 26,000 automobiles. The hurricane altered the shoreline of Long Island, washed away bridges, severed train service between New York and Boston and between cities in Connecticut and Rhode Island. It brought down 20,000 miles of power and telephone lines.

Often forgotten in accounts of the 1938 Hurricane is the damage it wreaked on New England’s timber. The storm blew down trees in over a third of the region – mostly in southern New Hampshire and central Massachusetts.

The blowdowns posed a dilemma: What to do with enough woody debris to nearly fill Rhode Island? And how to do it quickly enough so it didn’t set off tremendous forest fires?

Preventing Forest Fires

“Local residents felt they were sitting on a powder keg,” wrote Earl Peirce, chief of the division of co-operative forest protection within the U.S. Forest Service. Peirce wrote an account of the cleanup 30 years later.

The biggest tree cleanup would take place on the north shore of Long Island Sound, central Massachusetts and southern New Hampshire. New Hampshire Gov. Francis Murphy sent a telegram to President Franklin Roosevelt asking for help. So on Oct. 8, 1938 Roosevelt ordered the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Works Progress Administration to clean up the mess.

The stricken region had 50 CCC camps and 15,000 WPA workers. They worked on the tree cleanup for two years.

Damaged trees along a Rhode Island highway.

Trees damaged by the 1938 Hurricane along a Rhode Island highway.

Some damaged areas were too far from the CCC camps or WPA workers. The Forestry Service recruited crews of local men and trained them to do the work. They started in April 1939, working from 19 camps of between 50-100 men.

The 1938 hurricane did most of its timber damage on private land, and landowners had to be tracked down so they could give permission to have the government clean up their blowdowns –at no cost. Still, a few landowners refused to give permission because, in their words, they “had no use for Roosevelt.”

Workers cleared 10,121 miles of roads and trail and disposed of 214,902 acres of debris. All told, they cleared 600,000 acres of debris — nearly the size of Rhode Island.

Too Much Wood

What to do with all that wood piled in hundreds of lots scattered throughout New England?

The Forest Service estimated 1.6 million board feet of lumber — enough to build half a million houses — could be salvaged. Most was white pine.

So the federal government created the Northeastern Timber Salvage Administration (NETSA) to salvage the usable timber.

NETSA set up 246 wet sites – ponds and lakes – to store the logs so they wouldn’t be destroyed by insects or rot. Dry sites were established as well, along with offices in Boston, Hartford, Portland, Worcester, Manchester, N.H., Providence and Montpelier.

The agency was supposed to buy the logs, saw the logs and sell the lumber. NETSA paid $8.3 million to 13,000 landowners, mostly farmers, for timber damaged by the 1938 hurricane. Nearly 59 percent went to New Hampshire landowners.

It had to train people in lumber work: scaling and grading lumber, running sawmils and preventing and suppressing fires.

NETSA bought logs from November 1938 through June 1940. Selling them was another matter. The Great Depression was still on and there wasn’t much demand for lumber. With the exception of a sale to the New York, New Haven and Hartford Railroad, there was little interest in buying the hurricane logs.

Tree Cleanup Proves a Windfall

So the Eastern Pine Sales Corporation formed to buy the lumber from NETSA and to sell it – without flooding the New England lumber market. It was largely controlled by L. Grossman & Sons of Boston. What seemed at first like a risky venture for the Grossman company turned into a coup when the United States entered World War II. L. Grossman & Co. became the largest lumber company in New England.

Most of the lumber from the 1938 hurricane went to local companies with government contracts. They used it for the war effort.

NETSA’s salvage program ended on Dec. 31, 1943, but the lumber would be processed for several more years.

Photo courtesy National Archives.

The paper industry bought millions of logs. The National Archives photo above, taken in 1947, shows the Northern Kraft Paper Mill in Howland, Maine. The mill still used wood from the tree cleanup after the 1938 hurricane.

This story updated in 2022. If you’d like to read more about the 1938 hurricane, click here.

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A Canoe Trip Down the Allagash, July 6, 1911

The spell of the woods stayed for weeks with Henry Withee and Horace Bailey after they canoed down the Allagash River for nine days in July 1911. Their folks told them they were quiet, serene, and the voice of the river seemed to be still with them.

They were among the men and women who heeded the call of the Bangor and Aroostook Railroad to explore the Maine wilderness. The railroad, of course, promoted tourism to fill its seats with passengers.

Fishing in the Maine North Woods, 1885

Henry Withee grew up in Blanchard, Maine, where his mother ran a boardinghouse for lumbermen. He graduated from Colby College, worked as a school principal and then earned a law degree at Harvard University. In 1911, he started a law practice in Rockland, Maine. He was about 35 years old.

Horace ‘Hod’ Bailey, a native of Howland, Maine, was a lumber salesman in Boston seven years younger than Henry. The two men had talked about canoeing down the Allagash for several years.

Afterward, Henry typed an account of their nine-day trip and gave a copy to Hod. He described how they portaged in the heat, struggled over logjams, raced rapids, fished for trout, savored the beauty of the country and communed with deer, moose and songbirds. One day they narrowly escaped a spruce log hurtling toward them. One night they slept in a barn. Another evening they camped near a patch of wild blueberries and had for dinner baked potatoes, fried trout rolled in corn meal, fresh biscuit, cake and blueberries, tea and milk.

Henry inscribed the book, “To H.A.B. Competent Woodsman, Cheerful Dishwasher, Willing Worker and Agreeable Companion, this book is heartily dedicated.”

On July 6, 1911, Henry Withee wrote:

Before starting, we had resolved to do the trip as befitted men accustomed to the woods. We were not to employ a guide, we would tote our canoe and duffle across every carry without aid of any sort, sleep every night under our own shelter and cook and eat our own grub.

We kept all but three of these resolutions.

We arrived at the lake at seven, took the canoe on our shoulders and started back, replying chestily to some drummers who sat on the store steps.

Our gait was brisk until we got into the woods out of sight of the store – then, with perfect accord, we cast the canoe from us and sat down by the road.

That craft was scheduled to weigh sixty-five pounds. It deserved excess baggage charge of two hundred pounds more, in our opinion.

To learn more about their trip down the Allagash and to see Henry’s photos, click here to the Maine Memory Network.

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