Does the microwave oven owe its existence to a bizarre experiment with frozen hamsters? That's the claim Tom Scott stumbled upon while reading an article from 1997 that described the appliance as a tool invented to humanely warm frozen hamsters in the '50s. Is it an urban myth or an absurd legend? Tom decided to investigate, and the thread turned out to be much longer than expected.
Once again, the history of the microwave oven has been repeated countless times. In 1945, engineer Percy Spencer was working on a powerful military radar when it melted a candy bar in his pocket (some say it was chocolate, others a peanut butter bar). Then came popcorn (the first food deliberately cooked), and finally an egg that exploded and made a mess.
Some sources suggest that Spencer's candy story is apocryphal, but less than two years later, Raytheon launched its Radarange, a 1.8-meter-tall, 340-kilogram behemoth for large restaurants, ships, and other industrial kitchens. In less than 20 years, the microwave reached a size similar to what we know today, and added secondary features like a turntable for more even cooking. However, that doesn't explain where the hamsters come from...
Microwaves and Frozen Hamsters
Tom's investigation led him to a paper published in 1954, “Resuscitation of Hamsters after Supercooling or Partial Crystallization at Body Temperatures Below 0°C”, followed by another in 1955, and a third in 1959. These studies were developed by scientists at the National Institute for Medical Research, an old government agency in London (now part of the Francis Crick Institute), and they all share one name: James Lovelock. If the name sounds familiar, it's the same James Lovelock who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis and created the electron capture detector, which helped us discover the ozone hole, among other things.
The researchers were working in the field of cryobiology, and hamsters were merely their experimental subjects. The success rate wasn't very high at first, and the animals that recovered ended up with burns due to the thermal plates they used. It was Lovelock who proposed the application of microwaves in a calibrated environment for a more uniform and 'humane' thawing. The available sources offer conflicting information, but Tom was able to ignore all that for one reason: at the time of developing the video, James Lovelock was alive, and he granted him an interview.
Lovelock's Microwave
What did Lovelock do? In essence, he ended up building one of the first miniaturized microwaves in the UK, with the help of an old RAF transmitter he paid 10 shillings for. For his second version, he managed to obtain a ten-centimeter magnetron created by Harry Boot and Sir John Randall at the University of Birmingham. Lovelock admits that his position at a government agency simplified the acquisition process... and that he cooked a potato in his oven.
But the answer is a conditional 'yes': The microwave oven was 'reinvented' in the UK in the mid-'50s to revive frozen hamsters. The best part is that the success rate increased remarkably, and a combination of microwaves with artificial respiration revived almost all of the hamsters involved.
