The Microwave Oven at 50: It Has Barely Changed, But It Changed the Food Industry and How We Eat | QDaily Business History

In 50 years, the biggest change in the microwave oven has been its price.

"The greatest cooking discovery since fire" — that was the line in the first batch of microwave oven ads run by the American appliance maker Amana in 1968.

The first mass-produced microwave oven does not look all that different from its descendants 50 years later. Roughly the same size, with a dial on the right to set the time.

Most home appliances are not like this. The first mass-produced television had a wooden cabinet and the look of an old radio, with a small rounded-rectangle screen that bears no resemblance to a television today.

The first mass-produced refrigerator looked more like a safe redesigned by a 1950s science-fiction writer: a thick metal door, and a cylinder sticking out of the top that seemed ready to throw off an electric arc at any moment.

The first microwave oven to reach a home kitchen was the Amana Radarange R-1, born in 1967 and built by Amana, a refrigeration company that the American radar maker Raytheon had bought.

Its two dials were not a choice between time and temperature. The oven did only one thing: keep time. The upper dial went to 25 minutes, the lower one to 5 minutes, with the switches in between — green to start, blue for the light inside the box.

As on any microwave oven today, pulling the door open stopped it. That simple, effective safety catch has been there since the first day microwave ovens were sold to households.

Early microwave ovens were all very heavy. The R-1 weighed 40 kilograms, three to four times an ordinary microwave oven today. The core technology was still crude: the magnetron that produced the microwaves needed a magnetic field to work, so the box was packed with electromagnets.

The price was not modest either. The oven cost US$495, which with inflation comes to about US$3,575 in 2017.

Fifty years on, the microwave oven is standard equipment in nearly every home. It changed the food industry, and it changed how people put a quick meal together. Yet over all that time neither its functions nor its shape have changed much. The biggest change has been the price.

The Microwave Oven Was Born by Accident

Going from commercial use to the home took the microwave oven 20 years.

The microwave oven was invented after the Second World War. Percy Spencer, an engineer at Raytheon — a company that made magnetrons and, from there, radar — noticed by chance during an experiment that microwaves could heat food. Microwaves run at a frequency that stirs water molecules in particular, setting them vibrating fast and throwing off heat quickly.

Spencer later made an open metal box to warm his lunch and other food, until an egg he was heating exploded. He then added a protective door, which became the earliest prototype of the microwave oven.

After repeated research and testing, Raytheon filed a patent in 1946 for cooking food with microwaves and built the first microwave oven, the Radarange — radar (Radar) plus the stove (Range) it radiated into.

It stood on the floor, about the size of a two-door refrigerator today, and weighed 170 kilograms. It needed water for cooling, so it came with a 1,700-watt water-cooled magnetron. Installing it was a chore, and it drank electricity.

Costly and complicated to run, early microwave ovens went mainly to industrial users: ships, airplanes, restaurants. The military, a longstanding Raytheon customer, was among the first users too. A 1967 New York Times report described the U.S. Army using microwave ovens to get dinner ready for 200 people in an hour.

The heart of a microwave oven is the magnetron. The first ones needed magnetrons mounted on top and on the side; switched on, the microwaves they produced passed into the food, making the molecules inside oscillate at high speed and heat up through friction until the food was cooked. The size of the magnetron set the price and the size of the oven. Make the magnetron more efficient and you improved the oven.

Before home microwave ovens caught on, they also came in a wall-mounted form. In October 1955, Tappan used magnetron technology licensed from Raytheon to launch a relatively small wall-mounted oven, the Tappan RL-1, at 77 kilograms and US$1,295. Raytheon put out a similar wall-mounted model, close to Tappan's in both weight and price.

Neither made it into the home. The main reason was the price, beyond what most families could pay. According to a Stanford University research report, median household income in the United States between 1955 and 1960 was around US$5,000 a year. At about US$1,300 for a microwave oven, most households would have had to go three months without spending a cent to save up for one.

What actually brought change were two Raytheon acquisitions: New Japan Radio, a microwave technology company, in 1961, and Amana, the refrigeration company, in 1965.

New Japan Radio designed a small, simple, efficient magnetron; Amana supplied the cooling the oven needed once it finished heating. After two years of work, Raytheon finally produced, in 1967, a microwave oven at a workable price and weight — the first one described at the top of this article, 40 kilograms and US$495.

Around the same time, Litton, a defense contractor with wide experience in radar, was working on microwave ovens as well.

In March 1967, Litton spent US$100 million to buy Stouffer's, then a frozen food company (it was sold on to Nestlé in 1973). Stouffer's made frozen family dinners for supermarkets. Four years later, Litton launched a microwave oven under the Minutemaster brand and joined the fight.

The Microwave Oven Arrived, and the Food Industry Changed

Television spread across the United States in the 1950s, and RCA's first color set in 1954 changed how American families ate. More and more of them carried their plates to the television.

Swanson, a health-products company, launched the TV dinner in 1954: a foil tray divided into three compartments, holding a starch and two dishes. It was aimed at women who worked outside the home and were still responsible for the family dinner. Heat up a TV dinner and they could sit down with everyone in front of the set.

The American economy shifted in the 1960s. The rise of the service sector created demand for workers, and the women's rights movement shook up how American women thought about family and work. From 1960 on, both the number and the share of American women in paid work climbed noticeably. Demand for food that only needed heating climbed with it, especially as the microwave oven found its way into homes.

A 1963 New York Times report described how Frank G. Shattuck, a food-service company of the day, put microwave ovens into its restaurants, where staff and customers alike praised how easily they warmed food.

The report also argued that food suppliers should meet the new market by changing their packaging. As family life in America sped up through the 1960s, and television culture spread, the market wanted more and more food that was convenient and quick.

The New York Times reported that in the 1970s many large supermarket chains began pressing the big food companies to make microwave-ready frozen products a research priority. Supermarket operators saw that pushing microwave cooking might help them hold off the competitive pressure from fast-food chains like McDonald's and KFC.

Just then, doubts about the microwave oven set in. In 1968, a hospital called Walter Reed ran experiments on the ovens and concluded that this new member of the household leaked microwaves and could do some harm to the human body.

The suspicion knocked the young market back, and it left food producers slow to start making food suited to microwave ovens.

The Food and Drug Administration later showed by experiment that the microwave ovens then on sale leaked no more than 1 milliwatt per square centimeter. For the human body, leakage under 5 milliwatts per square centimeter is considered reasonably safe.

Still, to settle consumers' nerves, the FDA set manufacturing rules for microwave ovens in January 1971: no maker's oven could leak more than 5 milliwatts per square centimeter.

With a regulator's standard in place, large American food producers such as Shile Group and Campbell's began, from 1975, running production lines dedicated to microwave food. Campbell's put out 14 frozen products, among them packaged chicken for microwave cooking and three breakfast items.

By 1987 there were more than 760 microwave-ready foods on the market.

Big cookware makers such as Corning and Anchor Hocking started selling microwave-safe dishes and accessories. In 1978, the cookware company Nordic Ware went as far as developing a new thermoset plastic molding process to make cookware for microwave ovens.

Cookbooks about microwave cooking became popular too. In 1979, Swanson, the company behind the TV dinner, set up an information center for microwave oven owners to supply cooking advice.

Safety fears fading was one reason the microwave oven caught on in the 1970s. The other was that its functions never changed much, which let Asian manufacturers take market share on price and pull the retail price down.

Makers Tried Every New Feature They Could Think Of. For 50 Years, People Have Used Just One.

In more than 50 years, the core function of the microwave oven has not fundamentally changed: heat and cook food fast. It never turned into a social tool or a platform.

What changed was the magnetron, the oven's core hardware, and that was the key technical improvement — it is what made microwave ovens lighter and smaller.

Beyond that, not much moved. Take the control panel on the front: Amana, the first microwave oven company, tried electronic buttons in the mid-1970s, then added settings like reheat, soup, bake and high heat, plus an LED display. Whatever the other big makers tried later, Amana had tried already.

Later came inverter power, smart functions, phone controls, built-in ovens and plenty more. The way people use a microwave oven never changed.

What finally moved the market was a cheap price, which made the market bigger. First the Japanese and Korean makers won share through scale: produce at low labor cost, cut the price, sell more. Then Chinese manufacturers did the same thing at a lower price still, and took a larger share.

Japanese and Korean Makers Are What Truly Made the Microwave Oven Common

Japanese manufacturers also began developing microwave ovens in the 1960s. Sharp, Panasonic and Sanyo all went into the business on the strength of their experience making stoves, and because they would accept thin margins, they had an edge on the final price.

Harvard Business Review reported that from the 1970s on, Japanese makers sold cheap, compact microwave ovens in volume, with the smallest models down to US$150.

American brands at the time were priced like color televisions. Two new Litton microwave ovens released in 1972, for instance, cost US$349 and US$399. Color televisions of the same period sold for US$200 to US$800.

A 1974 Amana newspaper ad said: "Not all microwave ovens are alike. If you want a high-quality microwave oven, choose the Amana Radarange." It spent a full page on the design of the oven's outer door and interior, and on how it saved electricity and delivered more power.

To consumers, though, the microwave ovens the Japanese made did much the same things as those from Raytheon and Litton, and cost less.

Squeezed on price, American microwave oven brands — Amana, Litton, Tappan, GE — saw sales fall while Japanese sales climbed sharply.

The New York Times reported that by September 1972, U.S. imports of microwave ovens from Japan had reached US$7 million, against US$1.4 million in 1971.

By 1979, Japanese-made microwave ovens held 25% of the American market.

Amana tried cutting its prices, but on cost it could not match the Japanese and other Asian producers, who had their own advantage in labor.

In 1976, South Korea's Samsung entered the business, with costs lower still than the Japanese.

That year, Samsung vice president J.U. Chung took an interest in microwave ovens during a trip to the United States. At the prices of the day few Korean households could afford one, but what Samsung wanted was exports.

Samsung's engineers bought a General Electric oven, the Jet 230, took it apart to study it, then called on Japanese suppliers of magnetrons, buttons, plastics and other parts. It took two years before Samsung managed a working prototype, priced at US$600 — and it did not sell.

Not until 1980 did the American retail chain J. C. Penney order more than a thousand units from Samsung, on the condition that each sell for US$299. With the order in hand, Samsung bought a Japanese magnetron company to push costs down further and filled it.

By 1985, when General Electric stopped making microwave ovens, the two companies' costs were not comparable. On assembly labor, GE paid US$8 for every oven it built; Samsung paid 63 cents, 7.9% of GE's figure. On production lines and management, GE's cost was US$10; Samsung's was 2 cents.

In May 1985, General Electric gave up its own line and had Samsung build its microwave ovens instead.

By 1990, Amana's share of the American microwave oven market had fallen to 4.5% and Litton's to 3.9%, far behind the Japanese and Korean makers.

As the American companies lost the market, low prices made the microwave oven genuinely common. In 1986, 25% of American households had one. By 1997, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics showed nine in ten households did.

Only After It Reached China in the 1990s Did the Microwave Oven Become a Household Basic

In China in the early 1990s, a microwave oven was something only the small group who had gotten rich first could buy. Panasonic, Sharp, Samsung and Whirlpool held the Chinese market, at prices around 2,000 to 3,000 yuan.

By the National Bureau of Statistics' figures, the average annual wage of a Chinese worker in 1992 was only about 3,000 yuan. Even those with the money bought the traditional three big wedding appliances first.

The company that changed the price of the microwave oven for good was Galanz, which entered the market in 1992.

Before it made microwave ovens, Galanz had spent 14 years as a down-products factory. In 1993 it brought in microwave oven technology from Toshiba, handing over a 5% stake in exchange.

Like the other "Made in China" manufacturers starting out at the time, Galanz used the cost of labor to cut prices.

The China Business Times reported that Galanz began cutting microwave oven prices in August 1996, by an average of 40%.

It kept buying market share with price cuts. Over the 14 years from 1994 to 2007, Galanz cut prices at least 10 times, never by less than 30% to 40%, to pull in more buyers.

While cutting prices, Galanz also did what Samsung had done before it, taking on contract manufacturing for the overseas brands that could not match its costs.

The fiercest stretch of price cutting came after Midea entered the market in 1999. The war between the two companies walked the microwave oven down into the era of 399 yuan, then 299 yuan, and at one point 199 yuan. Today the five best-selling microwave ovens on JD.com all come from Midea and Galanz, at 299 to 399 yuan.

Sales grew outside China as well. According to UN Comtrade data, Chinese microwave oven exports made up about 58% of the world market in 2009, worth more than US$1.8 billion. That has held ever since; China is still the world's largest exporter of microwave ovens.

Taking a large share of the market on price also made the microwave oven a symbol of Chinese manufacturing in the 1990s. Before 2001, it came up again and again in the debate over China joining the World Trade Organization.

As late as 2011, a New York Times commentary on the tenth anniversary of China's WTO entry still reached for the "$49 microwave oven" as the example of what Chinese manufacturing could do. An Introduction to World Politics: Conflict and Consensus, published in the United States in 2012, used the price of a microwave oven as its example when it discussed the fight over exchange rates.

No other home appliance has changed so little since the day it was invented. Fifty years on, this simple, convenient thing still has no obvious replacement, and it will go on taking up the same small patch of the kitchen.

Image source: The Break Through