Nuke It!

Technology makes itself obsolete before I can read the instructions on the device I just bought. New gadgets and electronics seem to appear everyday, designed to make our lives  not only easier and more efficient but more fun too. We buy X-Boxes, Wii's, iPhones, iPads, 3-D TV's, and loads of other new and exciting stuff.  You can purchase a fridge with a computer, an alarm clock that predicts the weather, and books with no paper. My vacuum cleaner even tells me when the carpet is clean.  We have become so blase` about astonishing new inventions that nothing can surprise us anymore.  A phone that reads bar codes and takes videos?  So yesterday. Download a book in seconds? So what? Depending on your age you can't remember a time when technology didn't  upgrade every nanosecond.  Too bad really, because the excitement of discovering new technology is gone.

Can you remember when microwave ovens were first for sale?  They were actually invented as a by-product of the war effort during WWII.  But they were huge and not commercial. Even as they got smaller they were still not user friendly.

  

But then, a miracle. Do you remember your family's first microwave? I do. It was big and cumbersome and took up a huge amount of counter space. And the things it could do! Imagine cooking a baked potato in 5 minutes! Bacon could be had with a couple of paper towels and a plate.  No more grease all over the stove. A real advantage to children whose job it was to clean the kitchen.

The real excitement (besides baked potatoes)  was the way leftovers could be reheated plate by plate. No more pots and pans to scrub every night.  We grew to love the nights I later called "scrounge" because everyone could have something different. We'd get out all the leftovers and make our own TV dinners. This box saved time, energy and money. It was amazing and exciting and everyone could use it. Microwaves weren't just for mom or dad, they were a family gizmo and you could experience the excitement of a 5 minute potato anytime you wanted.

Think about life without one. No reheated coffee or food. And think how long frozen dinners would take to cook. The frozen meal industry took off after the invention of the microwave.  Before this, the only frozen food I ever ate was a Swanson's TV Dinner when my parents went out.  What a treat that was and the food was pretty awful.

For a time, many of us tried to cook actual meals in the microwave.  I cooked macaroni and cheese that boiled over every time. I had a fillet of sole recipe that looked promising but wasn't. We learned that rolls reheated became chewy but tortillas could be perfectly heated. Cooking vegetables in the microwave still produces edible meals. Still, reheating meals or cooking frozen meals remains the microwave's primary function I imagine.

The RadarRange, as the first ones were called, delivered on it's promise to make life easier and simpler. Moreover, the excitement this new technology generated was incredible. Recent technology is indeed more sophisticated but it hardly makes anyone's life simpler nor does it create the excitement of the microwave coming as it did at a time when modern electronics was in its infancy.