Sex, Bombs and Burgers (5 page)

In his early adulthood in the 1910s, Bush had supplemented his undergraduate studies at Tufts College near Boston by working at General Electric and as research director for American Radio, a small company started by his fellow students Charles Smith and Al Spencer. (The company achieved some minor success during the First World War with Smith’s invention of the S-Tube, which eliminated the need to use batteries in radios, but was all but wiped out by the Great Depression.) In 1917 Bush received his doctorate in electrical engineering from Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and by 1923 had become a professor at the latter. In 1922 Bush and fellow Tufts engineering student Laurence Marshall teamed up with Smith and set up the American Appliance Company to market another of Smith’s inventions, a refrigerator with no moving parts—its solid state making it less prone to breaking— but failed miserably when they found no takers. The trio’s backup plan was an improved version of the S-Tube. They brought Al Spencer back on board, along with his younger brother Percy, and by 1925 American Appliance was earning a profit.
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To avoid problems with a similarly named company operating out of the Midwest, the group renamed the business Raytheon Manufacturing—adding “theon,” Greek for “of the gods,” to the rays of light their tubes produced. For the beleaguered British, Raytheon proved to be a godsend indeed.

In his public service life, Bush had helped develop a submarine detector for the American government during the First World War, but the system was never used because of bureaucratic confusion between industry and the military. “That experience forced into my mind pretty solidly the complete lack of proper liaison between the military and the civilian in the development
of weapons in time of war, and what that lack meant,” he later recalled.
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In 1932 Bush became vice-president and dean of engineering at MIT, then moved to the prestigious Carnegie Institute of Washington as president in 1939, to be closer to the corridors of government power. Lack of co-operation was something he would not tolerate during the new conflict. Along with a group of fellow science administrators, including MIT president Karl Compton, Bush pitched President Franklin D. Roosevelt on an organization that would oversee research and development work between industry and the military. Bush showed Roosevelt a letter that proposed his National Defense Research Council and the president approved it on the spot. “The whole audience lasted less than ten minutes ... I came out with my ‘OK–FDR’ and all the wheels began to turn,” he later wrote.
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On June 12, 1940, the American military-industrial complex was born, with the patriot Vannevar Bush as its beaming father.

Bush was the chairman of the new NDRC while Compton was put in charge of developing radar. The first few meetings between Tizard’s delegation and the new American military-industrial brain trust were cautious, like a high-stakes poker game with neither side wanting to reveal its hand. Compton cautiously showed the British visitors the low-powered magnetrons developed by American scientists, which thawed the atmosphere between the two camps. After seeing that the two nations were on the same path, Tizard proudly demonstrated the high-powered British magnetron to the astonishment of his hosts, prompting the envious Compton to order the immediate establishment of the Radiation Laboratory at MIT to develop the device further. Large electronics manufacturers including General Electric, Bell Telephone and Western Electric were
brought in to mass-produce the magnetron, but they encountered a problem: because the gizmo had to be machine-chiselled from a solid copper block, producing it in mass quantities was difficult, time-consuming and expensive.

Both Compton and Bush, who by now had extricated himself from the day-to-day operations of Raytheon but still held a seat on its board of directors, knew the company’s talented lead inventor, Percy Spencer, well. Raytheon was small compared with the likes of GE and Bell, but the company was just down the road from MIT in Waltham, Massachusetts, so Spencer was called in to take a look at the magnetron.
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Percy Spencer was an orphan and, as a child, poor as dirt. His father died when he was eighteen months old and his mother abandoned him soon after, leaving him to be raised by his aunt and uncle in Howland, Maine. More bad luck struck at the age of seven when his uncle died. Spencer spent his childhood doing country chores such as saddling horses and chopping wood, and was so poor he used to hunt to eat. From the age of twelve he worked at a spool mill, starting before dawn and continuing on until after sunset.

The enterprising youngster was extraordinarily curious, though, and when it came time to install electricity in the mill, he volunteered to do it. He learned by trial and error and emerged from the project a competent electrician. When the
Titanic
sank in 1912, his imagination was sparked by the heroism of the radio operators who had helped rescue survivors. So he joined the navy and learned wireless telegraphy: “I just got hold of textbooks and taught myself while I was standing watch at night,” he later recalled.
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His self-education went so well that the navy made him head of wireless production during the First World War. By 1940
the Raytheon engineer was renowned among scientists at MIT. “Spencer became one of the best tube designers in the world; he could make a working tube out of a sardine can,” one said.
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This reputation served Spencer well when he asked if he could take the magnetron, Britain’s most closely guarded technological secret, home for the weekend. It was like asking the Queen if he could borrow the Crown Jewels. But with the combined brain trust of MIT vouching for Spencer, Henry Tizard reluctantly gave his blessing. Spencer returned with what now seems like a no-brainer of a suggestion: rather than carving the magnetron out of a single lump of copper, why not create it piecemeal from several sections?

Western Electric had already been awarded a $30 million contract to manufacture the magnetron tubes, but was only managing to produce about fifteen a day using the machining method. Spencer promised he could outdo that production with his alternative procedure, so MIT gave Raytheon a contract to make ten tubes. Raytheon president Marshall then made a bet-the-company decision by investing in a new building and the special equipment required for the process, including a hydrogen oven.
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Within a month, Raytheon was making thirty magnetrons a day, twice Western Electric’s output. With Spencer’s promise fulfilled, the contracts started to roll in. Before long, the company was manufacturing the majority of the magnetrons for American and British forces. By the end of the war, Raytheon was pumping out nearly 2,000 magnetrons a day,
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about 80 percent of all the devices used by the Allies.
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Spencer and Marshall’s gamble had paid off handsomely. In 1945 Raytheon pulled in revenue of $180 million, a staggering jump from $1.5 million before the war.
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More importantly, the gamble paid huge dividends for the Allies. From early 1941, when the new magnetron-powered detection system began to be installed, British and American planes had air superiority over their German rivals. The new system, dubbed “radio detection and ranging” or “radar,” persuaded Hitler to permanently cancel his already-delayed invasion. Radar ultimately saved an inestimable number of lives. During the first two years of the war, German bombs killed more than 20,000 London residents. In 1942, after radar had been fully installed, the number of fatalities plummeted to a mere twenty-seven.
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The scale of the horror experienced in Coventry in the fall of 1940 was never seen again in Britain. The country’s remaining architectural treasures, including the massive Gothic edifices of Wells Cathedral and Winchester Cathedral, escaped the war largely unscathed; thanks to the RAF’s secret weapon, England’s storied past survived to be admired by future generations. A new, modernized Coventry Cathedral, also dedicated to St. Michael, was built right next to the old one after the war, becoming the city’s third cathedral.

In the later years of the war, Raytheon expanded beyond magnetron tubes into building whole radar systems, which were then installed on American ships in the Pacific. “With radar we could see the Japanese warships at night,” says Raytheon archivist and former vice-president Norman Krim, who has been with the company in various executive roles since its beginning. “They had no idea we could see them and that turned the war around.”
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Vannevar Bush shared that view in his memoirs, where he wrote that radar’s importance to ending the war was surpassed only by the atomic bomb.
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James Phinney Baxter III, the official historian of the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development, was
no less effusive: “When the members of the Tizard Mission brought the cavity magnetron to America in 1940, they carried the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores.”

The magnetron’s military impact is hard to overstate. The scientists who developed radar had an easy moral justification: they were working on a defence system for an unjust war fought against an evil enemy. As with all technology, however, radar also had its dark side. Just as it saved thousands of lives, it also helped end many more. Radar guided the
Enola Gay
to its destination, Hiroshima, where it dropped the atomic bomb that killed an estimated 140,000 people, and helped
Bockscar
find Nagasaki, where another 80,000 were killed by the second bomb.
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Radar has been installed in every guidance system, fighter jet and bomber used in every war since, bringing its total death count to date to an inestimable figure. Journalists who hailed the invention as “our miracle ally” in 1945 also correctly identified radar’s dual nature by tracing it back to its roots. “In a very real sense it represents the mythical death-ray by giving accurate precision so that the death stroke may be delivered,” said a
New
York Times
editorial.
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Radar in the Kitchen

When the war ended, Raytheon’s fortunes sank just as fast as they had climbed. The American government had ratcheted up its defence spending as the war progressed, devoting almost 90 percent ($82.9 billion) of its entire 1945 budget to military expenditure. The following year, that spending decreased dramatically to just over three-quarters of the total budget, then plummeted to 37 percent ($12 billion) in 1947.
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Raytheon was scrambling. At the end of the war the company had employed
18,000 people but was down to 2,500 by 1947. Profit dropped to $1 million by 1956,
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from $3.4 million in 1945.
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Krim, a young engineer at Raytheon in its early days, remembers how dismayed Percy Spencer was. “He said, ‘What the hell am I going to do?’” Krim recalls. “No more war, no more radar, no more magnetrons. ‘I’ve got to find some use for these magnetrons to keep these people working.’ There was a mad rush for products we could make.”
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Raytheon was able to sell radar devices to commercial shipping operations, including public services such as ferries, but needed to put its invention to commercial use if it was going to stay afloat. The company’s first real foray into the wider consumer market was the poorly thought-out Microtherm, a gadget that used the heating properties of the magnetron to treat a variety of ailments, including bursitis and arthritis. The equipment, sold only to doctors, medical suppliers and institutions, could heat “any area, allows temperature penetration of as much as two inches and increases blood circulation by 250%,” according to news reports at the time.
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As smart as Spencer was, frying away aches and pains with microwave radiation was simply not one of his better ideas. Doctors in the forties and fifties agreed and the Microtherm sold poorly. Krim, who by the sixties had risen through the Raytheon ranks to become the company’s “undertaker”—the person called in to dispose of unwanted assets—sold off the money-losing Microtherm business in 1961.
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The magnetron’s ultimate commercial use was found by accident. Near the end of the war, Spencer was experimenting with magnetrons in his lab and noticed that a chocolate bar in his pocket had melted. Curious about the device’s heating effects, he brought in some popcorn kernels, which popped
after being exposed. The next day, he exploded an egg using its heat waves. (I remember making the same discovery at age eight, when I blew up an entire pack of hot dogs in our microwave, much to the dismay of my screaming mother.) Spencer knew he was on to something so he applied for and got a patent on microwave cooking. A team of engineers set to work on transforming the magnetron into a cooking device and before long, their efforts bore fruit: they created an oven that heated the water molecules in food but left moisture-free ceramic or plastic containers cool.

The first microwave ovens were hulking behemoths. They stood nearly two metres tall, weighed three hundred kilos and were the size of a refrigerator. They weren’t cheap, either; Raytheon sold them mainly to large restaurants, hotel chains, ocean liners and railways for between $2,000 and $3,000, or the equivalent of $22,000 to $34,000 dollars in 2010 terms.
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They were made of solid steel with lead-lined ovens to prevent the microwaves from escaping. Their name, however, was perfect: the Radarange.

Large industrial customers loved the Radarange because it dramatically cut down on cooking times. The oven cooked a potato in four minutes, a ten-ounce sirloin steak in fifty seconds, hot gingerbread in twenty seconds and a lobster in two-anda-half minutes. The highly competitive steamship industry— where cruise liners emphasized speed, style, luxury and, above all, cuisine—particularly prized them. Potato chip makers such as Lay’s also greatly preferred the microwave ovens to their traditional infrared counterparts for drying chips that had just been cooked in oil. Drying with infrared ovens took days while the Radarange did the trick in minutes.