Nice article about Percy Spencer - the man who recognised the microwaves can heat objects and who perfected the Microwave Oven.
From SoftSlide:
Percy Spencer and His Itch to KnowPeople like this make America what it is -- somehow i cannot imagine an Islamist being like this...
Percy Spencer is the nosiest man I have ever known. Now 63, he still has an intense, small boy's compulsion to explore every wonder in the world around him. The results of his relentless curiosity have touched the lives of each of us.
Recently I walked into his office at the Raytheon Manufacturing Co. in Waltham, Mass. - an office befitting the senior vice-president of one of the nation's largest electronic' manufacturers. "Hi, Don," the stocky, shirt-sleeved Down-Easter shouted from behind his desk. "Where'd you get the shoes?"
The moccasin-type shoes weren't that different, but I knew Percy. Were the shoes comfortable, he asked. Would they wear? Why were they stitched like that? In a minute I had one shoe off, so that he could examine it. He wanted to know just how it was made.
The story is typical of Percy Spencer's direct, homey approach, which he brings even to the miracle world of modern electronics. One day a dozen years ago he was visiting a lab where magnetrons, the power tubes of radar sets, were being tested. Suddenly, he felt a peanut bar start to cook in his pocket. Other scientists had noticed this phenomenon, but Spencer itched to know more about it.
He sent a boy out for a package of popcorn. When he held it near a magnetron, popcorn exploded all over the lab. Next morning he brought in a kettle, cut a hole in the side and put an uncooked egg (in its shell) into the pot. Then he moved a magnetron against the hole and turned on the juice. A skeptical engineer peeked over the top of the pot just in time to catch a faceful of cooked egg. The reason? The yolk cooked faster than the outside, causing the egg to burst.
Spencer had discovered that you could cook with high-frequency radio waves. He got a patent on the "radar range," one of the 225 he holds. The new device will cook a sirloin steak in one minute, a plump Thanksgiving turkey in little more than half an hour. Used for some time in restaurants, Pullman diners and ocean liners, radar ranges are now being produced for the home.
This constant curiosity helped Percy Spencer turn an underprivileged childhood into an especially privileged one. Born in Howland, Maine, a remote rural community, he was twice orphaned when a child. His father died when he was 18 months old, and soon his mother left home, turning Percy over to an aunt and uncle. The uncle was like a father to him, but when Percy was only seven, this second father died.
Percy didn't waste time feeling sorry for himself. He was too busy learning a country boy's chores - how to chop wood, hoe, saddle a horse, help with the preserving, skin a deer, saw a straight line and improvise solutions to the problems of survival, a skill famous as "Yankee ingenuity."
When he was 12 he trudged off to the spool mill in the cold, gray Maine dawn and worked till after sundown. Four years later his curiosity led him into something new. The local paper mill was to be electrified. Although he had no formal knowledge of electricity (in 1910 few people knew much about it), Percy signed on as one of three men to install the system. Learning entirely by trial and error, he emerged a competent electrician.
When, in 1912, the Titanic sank, the heroism of the wireless operators sparked the boy's imagination. He joined the Navy to learn wireless telegraphy. He did not mention his limited education when. The Navy sent him to its radio school. "I just got hold of a lot of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch at night," he explains.
He has kept up this practice of self-education all his life-"solving my own situation," he calls it. There is no count of the hundreds of nights he has spent painfully working out problems in trigonometry, calculus, chemistry, physics, metallurgy and other areas of learning.
