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One day in spring 1945, physics engineer Percy Spencer was walking past a switched on piece of radar equipment when he felt something sticky in his pocket. It turned out to be a chocolate peanut bar he had been saving for his coffee break. Intrigued, he set out to discover why it had suddenly melted. The equipment concerned was a magnetron tube, the heart of a radar set. Radar had been invented by the British in World War 2 to detect enemy aircraft at night using short waves or microwaves. But it wasn't until Spencer, an engineer at a small time firm called Raytheon in Boston, US, worked out a way of mass producing the tubes that radar made a real difference in the war. The day after the chocolate incident, Spencer sent a boy out to buy some popcorn. He placed the kernels near the magnetron tube. They immediately started popping round the lab. His next experiment was with an egg, which he put inside a kettle. Curious colleagues gathered round to watch it quaking. One unlucky director bent down to take a closer look. Just at the moment the egg exploded, Spencer came to realize that the microwaves were heating the food by agitating its water and fat molecules, which meant that the inside cooked just as fast as the outside. Raytheon engineers soon refined the idea. The first microwave, 5 foot, 6 inches tall and weighing 750 lbs, was installed in a Boston restaurant for testing in 1946. The first commercial microwave hit the market the following year. It was named Radar Range following a competition among Raytheon employees. Spencer and his colleagues confidently expected a cooking revolution. But the machine was primitive, enormous and at 3000 dollars, too expensive. All too soon, chefs realized its main drawback. Meat refused to brown and food emerged limp and flabby. The company chairman's chef quit in disgust because he was told to use the radar range. Not until the 1960s, when the first counter top microwave was produced, did sales at last begin to take off. The first model in 1967 was 100 volts and cost just under $500. By 1975, sales of microwaves overtook gas cookers in the US. Now, nearly 90% of households in Britain and the US use a microwave oven.