Sex, Bombs and Burgers (6 page)

Raytheon tried to expand its market with the first Radarange for the home in 1955, but its enormous expense—about $1,200, or the equivalent of $9,000 today—meant few sales.
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There were also Microtherm-like safety concerns; many families weren’t sure if they wanted to be near a radiation-emitting device. By 1957 only a few thousand had found their way into American homes.
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Five years later, the ovens had dropped in price to just under $800, but that was still beyond the means of most families, and only 10,000 units had sold.
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Still, some consumers recognized the irreversible hand of progress when they saw it. “This is not a trend,” one housewife said. “The only thing I don’t cook in my electronic range is coffee. It is a time saver because I can prepare dinner in a half an hour.”
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Raytheon’s new president Thomas Phillips shared that sentiment, even though the company had lost millions on the Radarange by 1965. He felt the only way to get a return on investment was to speed the oven’s adoption in the home, so he acquired Iowa-based Amana Refrigeration and transferred Raytheon’s knowledge of microwave ovens to the freezer maker. Krim recalls that Amana president George Foerstner’s plan to spur sales was simple. “He said, ‘I don’t give a damn what’s inside that box, it has to sell retail for less than $500.’” The homeappliance maker succeeded where the military contractor failed— by squeezing production efficiencies into the manufacturing process. Amana not only brought the Radarange’s price down to under $500, it also shrank the oven to fit on a countertop. Helped by government safety regulations that assured consumers the ovens were safe, sales boomed. Estimates pegged sales of microwaves in 1975 at 840,000, with Amana predicting that 10 percent of American homes would have one by early 1978.
The ovens took off even faster in Japan, where safety concerns were less prevalent; about 1.5 million were sold in 1975, representing about 17 percent of households.
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The secret behind the ovens’ success was best summed up in a 1976
New York Times
article. Estelle Silverstone, a New York attorney whose husband was a radiotherapist, was quoted reflecting on the new reality facing women—that of a double-income, dual-career family, short on time for meal preparation. “I’ve had a microwave for seven years. I don’t think I could live without it,” she said. “Leftovers don’t taste like leftovers anymore. I hate to clean up and there are no pots and pans. It’s not a substitute for a conventional oven, but I find it indispensable.”
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The age of cooking convenience had finally arrived in the home. The microwave oven was the perfect invention for a postwar society that put a premium on speed. With an increasing number of families seeing both parents going off to work, spare time was becoming more and more precious. The microwave

helped facilitate those busy lives.

By the early twenty-first century, 96 percent of American homes
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and 87 percent of British homes had a microwave oven.
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Today, about 350 million are in use around the world and another twenty million are sold each year. The microwave has reached such a level of ubiquity that it is no longer considered the iconic aspirational purchase it once was. In Britain, where the magnetron was invented, the microwave was removed from the basket of goods used to measure the cost of living in 2008. The plummeting value of the ovens, which can now be had for as low as $25, no longer provides a useful indicator of consumer trends. “We have to make room for new items in the basket and microwaves are no longer different to
any other household appliance,” a British statistician said.
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The microwave’s invasion of the home is complete, with the previously high-tech device now as mundane as a toaster or can opener.

The Microwave’s Sidekicks

The Radarange didn’t revolutionize home cooking on its own, though. It had lots of help in the form of new plastics such as Teflon and Saran that were also side effects of weapons development. Teflon, for one, was a direct by-product of the Manhattan Project.

In 1942 U.S. Brigadier-General Leslie Richard Groves, the military commander of the atomic bomb project, twisted the figurative arm of chemical and explosives maker DuPont to help. The company had wanted to steer clear of the conflict after being accused of profiteering during the First World War for selling munitions to Britain and France before the United States joined in. DuPont accepted Groves’s task reluctantly and limited itself to an official fee of one dollar
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after the general argued that the bomb would shorten the war and prevent tens of thousands of American casualties.
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His argument was likely strengthened by the fact that President Roosevelt’s daughterin-law Ethel was also the DuPont family’s heiress. Appearances aside, DuPont took on the key responsibility of producing plutonium, the man-made element derived from the chemical separation of uranium atoms. The company embraced the mission with zeal and selected Hanford, a small, remote mountain town along the Columbia River in Washington State, as the site of its main production facility. By late 1944, after an investment of several millions toward building chemical
reactors, separation plants, raw material facilities, acres of housing and miles of roads, the once desolate town had grown to become the third largest city in the state, with a population of 55,000.
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Hanford was in fact the largest plant DuPont had ever constructed.
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Plutonium production was a laborious and expensive process that required miles upon miles of pipes, pumps and barriers. An ounce of dust, grime or grease could ruin the entire system by entering through a tiny pinhole, yet a sealant that could perform a perfect patching job did not exist. DuPont decided to try out a substance that research chemist Roy Plunkett had accidentally discovered in 1938 at one of its labs in New Jersey. While experimenting with refrigerants, Plunkett opened a container of tetrafluoroethylene, only to find that the gas inside had solidified into a white resin. He found the new substance, which he dubbed polytetrafluoroethylene, to be extremely slippery and resistant to chemicals and heat. DuPont tested the substance as a sealant in its plutonium plant and found it plugged all the pipes and pumps perfectly. It was also put to use as a non-corrosive coating for artillery shell nose cones and as a high-performance lining for liquid fuel storage tanks, tasks at which it also excelled. The company patented the substance in 1941 and trademarked it just before the war ended under the name Teflon.

The substance was first sold in 1946 as a sealant for the electronic, chemical and automotive industries and took off in the late fifties once a home use was found. In 1954 French engineer Marc Grégoire invented a process for bonding Teflon with an aluminum frying pan, with which he launched his Tefal company. Consumers, happy about no longer having to fry their food in a pound of butter to stop it sticking to the
pan, snapped up Tefal’s product (and the inevitable clones) in droves. By 1961 the company was selling a million pans a month.
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Teflon’s use expanded again in 1969, when American engineer Bob Gore discovered it could be stretched into a porous, super-strong filament. His new version of Teflon turned out to be an excellent transmitter of computer data and a good material for surgical supplies. Its ability to keep out moisture but let in air also meant it was the first material that could actually “breathe,” which made it ideal for waterproofing clothing. After several years of development, “Gore-Tex” clothes hit the market in 1980, and skiers would never again have to come home soaking wet.

Saran Wrap also had its origins during the war, and like so many good inventions, it too was an accident. In what reads like the origin story of a comic-book super hero, Ralph Wiley, an unwitting college student working at Dow Chemical’s labs in Michigan, was performing his chores one night when he found some beakers he couldn’t scrub clean. He dubbed the green substance stuck to them “eonite” after an indestructible metal that was supposed to save the world from the Great Depression in a
Little Orphan Annie
comic strip. Upon examining the goo, Dow researchers gave it the more scientific name of polyvinylidene chloride (PVDC). Wiley didn’t end up gaining super powers, but Dow did turn the substance into a greasy green film, which was dubbed Saran, and tested it during the war by spraying it on fighter planes. Saran did a good job at keeping out oxygen and water vapour and was perfect for protecting the planes on aircraft carriers from the spray of salt water. The substance saved the navy time and effort by allowing planes to be shipped on the decks of aircraft carriers, rather than disassembled and stored
below decks in pieces. Guns were also wrapped in the protective plastic, like death-dealing lollipops. A wartime ad from Dow proclaimed that when “men on our fighting fronts throughout the world ... unpack a machine gun they find it protected from moisture with Saran Film. There are no coatings of grease to be removed—no time lost. The gun slips out of its Saran Film envelope clean, uncorroded, ready for action!”

After the war, Saran went commercial. By 1950 the plastic was being sprayed onto everything from bus seats to clothes to drapes, all of which it made more water-resistant. Dow’s revenue climbed steadily thanks to Saran
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and by 1952 the company was churning out more than fifty million tons of the stuff.
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The plastic’s real impact, however, came a year later, when it was turned into a clear, clingy film that could be stretched over food, allowing people to store leftovers in the refrigerator. Saran Wrap was the perfect partner for the Radarange; the plastic kept leftovers from spoiling long enough to be reheated in the microwave. Buoyed by sales of new plastic products, particularly Saran Wrap, Dow ended the decade with record sales and profits.
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Saran and other competing plastic wraps were becoming ubiquitous kitchen fixtures.

The most important plastic to come out of the war, however, was polyethylene. This highly versatile, variabledensity substance was discovered, again by accident, before the war by British researchers working for Imperial Chemical Industries in London. In their search for new plastics, Eric Fawcett and Reginald Gibson found that a mixture of ethylene and benzaldehyde produced a white, waxy substance. The experiment yielded a usable result only because it had been contaminated with an unknown amount of oxygen, an accident
that took the scientists years to recreate. Polyethylene wasn’t truly born until 1939, just in time for the war, when it became the primary material for insulating cables on another new British invention: radar. Although Germany developed its own detection system during the war, its scientists never did come up with polyethylene, which meant its troops faced a disadvantage in situations where moisture was a factor. German boats and planes travelling through rain and clouds often saw their radar malfunction.

DuPont licensed polyethylene from ICI, but aside from insulating radar and other telecommunications equipment, the company didn’t know what to do with it.
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Late in the war it gave one of its former engineers, Earl Tupper, a few tons of the plastic to play with, which he used to make gas masks and signal lamp parts. Tupper struck it rich after the war by using the plastic to create a range of storage containers with liquidand airtight sealable lids.
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The containers, egotistically dubbed “Tupperware”—not that Gore-Tex was particularly modest— showed DuPont and others the way in plastics. Before long, polyethylene was everywhere: in dishware, furniture, bags, toys (including two of the biggest crazes of the fifties, the Frisbee and the hula hoop), shampoo and soda pop bottles, packaging, pens and even clothes. The plastic’s versatility and uses were limited only by manufacturers’ imaginations. ICI and DuPont proved to be the most imaginative and established themselves as the biggest plastics makers in the world. For his part, Tupper sold his Tupperware company to Rexall Drugs in 1958 for a reported $10 million, which he used to buy a small Central American island where he lived as a hermit until his death in 1984. This only sounds odd until you compare it with the fate
of Richard James, the inventor of the Slinky, as we’ll see in chapter four.

The Dark Side of Plastic

For all the Allied advances in plastics, it was actually Germany that led the way in the development of synthetic materials. The Nazis had two good reasons for their accelerated research: Germany had experienced material shortages more acutely than any other nation during the First World War, and after that conflict it was prohibited by Allied sanctions from stockpiling resources that could be used for armaments. As a result, the German people were already familiar with synthetic or “ersatz” products by the twenties. In 1925 a group of chemical companies were brought together into the Interessen-Gemeinschaft Farbenindustrie conglomerate, better known as I.G. Farben, as part of a strategy to create materials that could circumvent treaty limitations and allow Germany to prepare for future wars. Over the next decade, the conglomerate hired the country’s best scientists, who then rewrote the book on polymers—chemical compounds made up of a large number of identical components linked together like a chain. With their government-approved mandate, Farben chemists synthesized an average of one new polymer every day for ten years.
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When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hitler immediately recognized the value of plastic and put Germany’s scientific community at the disposal of the state. “It is the task of science to give us those materials nature has cruelly denied us,” he said. “Science is only free if she can sovereignly master those problems posed to her by life.”
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By the time the war broke out in 1939, Germany’s military machine was largely synthetic, and more than 85 percent of its strategic materials were being made by Farben.