How Microwave Cookers Helped Stop Scud Missiles
Sydney Morning Herald
Thursday January 24, 1991
BOSTON, Wednesday: If you bought a microwave oven when they first came on the market, in a small way you were striking a blow against Saddam Hussein.
When people began buying microwaves in their millions from the early to mid-1970s, they were adding to the fortunes of a Boston-based electronics company, Raytheon, which invented the appliance.
Raytheon produces the Patriot anti-missile system, which has also become a household word. The research effort that went into this advanced weapon was partly funded by the profits from the company's initial monopoly on sales and world-wide licensing agreements for microwave ovens.
Since last Friday, when the first Iraqi missile fired towards Dhahran was destroyed in mid-air by the Patriot, Raytheon has become the focus of a renewed sense of national pride in the country's technological competence.
The company's operations are classified, which halted efforts by local television crews to make famous some of the faces of the 7,000 designers, technicians and assembly workers at the company's plant.
The campus-like complex is set well back from Route 93 on the perimeter of Boston where the sprawling plants of big name companies like Hewlett Packard and Gillette can be found.
Since the Gulf crisis began last August, Raytheon has tightened security at its seven plants in eastern Massachusetts, including its headquarters in Lexington.
Lexington, closer to the city of Boston, is an historical landmark, the site of bloody battles in the War of Independence between British redcoats and American patriots, after whom the antimissile system is named.
Two local politicians, Congressman Chester Atkins and a member of the State Legislature, Gary Coon, were the only outsiders able to visit the plant yesterday to congratulate the workers.
Since August many have worked 14-hour days, seven days a week to meet higher production schedules.
Mr Coon said the workers were jubilant at a message from a military official in the Gulf that at the ground zero target of the first missile destroyed by a Patriot over Dhahran was a concentration of about 500 residents.
Raytheon was set up in 1922 to make radio valves. In World War II, company technicians found a way of mass-producing magnetrons - the transmitter tubes invented by the British for modern radar systems.
After the war, an inventor, Percy Spender, was standing next to a magnetron and noticed that a candy bar in his pocket melted. When he began cooking an egg in a hollow he made in the side of a magnetron the yolk suddenly exploded in the face of a nearby engineer. This was the beginning of microwave cooking
Raytheon is the fifth largest arms manufacturer in the United States and the country's 53rd largest industrial company.
© 1991 Sydney Morning Herald