I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.

- And... rolling. I can't click on

this

video. I mean, I could, but it wouldn't really be fair to anyone involved. I know the title and thumbnail won't appeal to many people, but I hope you can trust me when I say: I

promise

this

story

is really

interesting

. Because it is. This is one of the best things I've found while researching in years. This starts when I'm looking up old TV shows and I'm researching three tangents deep, and I find this incredible line in a 1997 newspaper article: "The microwave was invented to satisfy the need to humanely heat hamsters in 1997 Labs. 1950".

And I read that and I thought: that's ridiculous. No, it was not. It was? There is a well-known

story

about the engineer who "invented the microwave." Percy Spencer, just after World War II, was working on one of the new military-grade radars while it was active, and noticed that the peanut bar in his back pocket had melted, implying that the radar He also almost cooked some of it. Are unshielded radars really dangerous? but it was the 1940s. The attitude towards safety was a little more lax. Now it was no surprise that electromagnetic radiation could heat things. In fact, people had been using it for a while.

Different wavelengths had different effects, but Percy Spencer was the first person to realize that cooking could be done efficiently with the wavelengths emitted by radar, and then he realized that it could be sold and then sold. He realized, well, he could turn that into. a usable product. Because a massive satellite dish is basically the same technology as this microwave. I'm not going to try to take this apart. I'm not qualified. And here is a high voltage capacitor that can carry enough charge to kill. Don't play with this unless you know what you're doing. But in here there is...

In here, in the part that you can't access, there is a microwave generator called a magnetron. It moves electrical current through a large magnet with a hole in it. And because... physics, that produces electromagnetic radiation. Tune the size of the hole in the magnet and you will get different radiation frequencies. The best analogy I've found is that it's like blowing air on glass bottles and changing the shade by changing the amount of water inside. So... . That, but with electricity. ...look, I don't have a degree in physics. Simply put, a magnetron converts electricity into electromagnetic radiation. You send pulses of that radiation into the sky and hear the echoes, you have radar and you helped win World War II.

Or you could place a magnetron inside a safe, radiation-proof box called a Faraday cage, tune the wavelengths so that water absorbs the radiation easily, and you have a microwave. And you can prepare lunch. The technical term is "diathermic heating." Less than a year after the melted peanut bar incident, which could easily have been the "cooked hand incident" or worse, but less than a year after that, that engineer's company, the defense contractor Raytheon launched the first commercial. microwave. It was called Radarange. It was the size of a refrigerator. It had to be actively cooled. It was incredibly expensive and designed for large commercial kitchens.

That was 1947. The first microwave as we would know it today, a cheap plug-in box, dated back to the late 1960s, once magnetron technology had advanced a bit. At no point in that well-known and well-cited story does anyone mention heating hamsters in laboratories in the 1950s. So that should be pretty easy to disprove, right? It's going to be an urban legend. There are many urban legends like that. So I started doing some magazine searches and quickly found articles from the 1950s that talked about resuscitating frozen rats and hamsters. Those papers were written by scientists at the National Institute for Medical Research, a government laboratory in Mill Hill, in the northern suburbs of London, about half a mile in that direction.

I would have filmed closer to it, but unfortunately, it was torn down a few years ago and the whole area is now a bunch of newly built housing. Anyway, National Institute of Medical Research. In the 1950s, that research included cryobiology, the effects of extreme cold on bodies and tissues. Scientists at that lab froze rats and hamsters to the point of death. They used ice and a propylene glycol bath, which is an airplane deicer, kept at subzero temperatures, and at that point the animal is dead and will not recover on its own. No heart rate, no breathing, internal temperature of around 1°C, between 10 and 50% of the animal's body water frozen.

And then, by applying heated spatulas to the chest or high-intensity heated rays of light, the researchers would try to warm the animals and bring them back to life. The success rate was not very good and the animals often suffered burns, but sometimes it worked. We'll see later why they were doing that! But in 1955, one of the researchers had the idea of ​​using a magnetron, reasoning that it would be much safer and more humane to reheat the entire animal at once rather than risk burning it. Actually, he told one of the researchers, there's a name in that article that might look a little familiar to you.

James Lovelock, one of the last independent scientists, born in 1919, when "scientist" could be quite a job description rather than "botanist" or "physicist" or "computational linguist." Someone who worked across disciplines on whatever he found

interesting

or whatever he was hired to do. Lovelock is best known for inventing Gaia theory, the idea of ​​the Earth as a self-regulating system. He also invented the electronic capture detector that found CFCs in the atmosphere and helped discover the ozone hole. The hardware he helped design for NASA is on Mars because he landed there with the Viking probes in 1976. And one of the first projects of his career, back in the 1950s, was at the National Institute for Medical Research freezing rats and hamsters, and had the idea to use the microwave di-a-ther-my..., dia-tha-my? dia-tha...? - "Diathermy." - To reheat them.

But the articles and anecdotes from that time seem to contradict each other. The timeline is difficult to reconstruct. There are reliable sources with completely different stories and claims. So I went to ask him about it. - "Do you know that you are the first person to come and ask me about the freezing job?" - Because James Lovelock, 101 years old, lives somewhere vaguely here on the south coast of England, goes for a walk on the Coast every day and was happy to be interviewed. One biologist, Audrey Smith, was able to revive a hamster that had been frozen.

When they woke up, they suffered a gigantic burn all over their chest and that must have been quite painful, and it was. complicated I thought, this is a terrible way to do it. So I said: "Why don't you use diathermy?" , which is fair. I took it to the lab the next day and said, "Look, here's your diathermy. I thought it was very messy." After some research, sure enough, there were 10 centimeter magnetrons that had been invented by Boot and Randall at the University of Birmingham during the war. Getting one of those is not easy. And this is where it helped me. a bit being in a government department.

So I just made some inquiries. "How can I get hold of...?" “Is there any chance I could borrow one of your magnetrons?” And he said, “Oh, no.” He said, “We can give you one if you want.” It's an interesting cause, why not?" I linked this with a waveguide, in a metal box. It wasn't so much a box. It was just a thing made of chicken wire, except it's finer than chicken wire. chicken wire, a little more like mesh. And that was like the box of a microwave oven. And I put the microwave on it. And I said to Audrey: Now put your hamster in there! - That's maybe a microwave.

James Lovelock may not have invented THE first microwave, but he certainly invented a microwave. The idea of ​​using magnetrons to heat things wasn't his, but no one else was putting one in a Faraday cage box on a desk. The big commercial

microwaves

for kitchens. of restaurants are not the same and, furthermore, they were not even on sale in the UK until a few years later. - I put a potato in it and baked it and it was perfectly fine - Safety procedures were occasionally a little lax for. modern standards. - During the experiments, while we were building it, the object would open and the radiation would bounce around the room and the light bulbs would turn on without warning.

The filament simply had the same wavelength as the radiation, it would absorb it and light up. And the pound notes were the funniest. They would catch fire because the metal strip inside was about the wavelength of the magnetron. - And here's the really surprising thing: it worked. - We put the hamster there, frozen. And I mean frozen solids. It was like a piece of wood when you dropped it on the bench. I turned the device up to maximum power in the microwave, which produced approximately one kilowatt. And with a timer. And after so many seconds, the hamster woke up and started wandering around. - Do I have to say don't try this at home?

I mean there are enough people of all ages watching that, statistically yes, I need to say it. Don't try this at home. It is unnecessary cruelty. You will not be doing medical research, you will be committing a crime. Context is really important, but so has the research been done! More than 50 years ago. There are tables of survival and warming rates, and it turns out that with a microwave, because that's what it was, with a precisely calibrated microwave and with artificial respiration to start pumping oxygen around the body, almost all of the rodents that froze were resuscitated. successfully.

That's the word biologists use. Revival. According to one of the newspapers, he is healthy, behaves as usual and is retiring in an animal home. From being frozen to death, sometimes multiple times. So the last question is: why? - Well, this could be of immense importance for medicine. For example, to preserve tissues for transfer and also for blood transfusions, because at that time blood was kept in the blood bank for three weeks and then thrown into the sink. - Imagine if that had worked on larger animals. At that time humanity did not know what the limits were.

This was an open question. The reason all those science fiction writers and comic book authors of the 1960s had people frozen in time or astronauts sent into cryosleep might be because, for a while, it seemed like that might actually be possible. If diathermic freezing and rewarming worked on hamsters... then maybe it works on rabbits. If it worked on rabbits, maybe it works on primates. And if it worked in primates... then maybe it works in humans. Unfortunately it was not like that. It does not expand. - You can't freeze a human. It's partly a question of how quickly you can get the antifreeze agent to diffuse into the cells.

A human is too big. It's just a question of size. A hamster is an acceptable size. - Sometimes research hits a wall. Find out something interesting about hamsters, check it out. He casually invents a microwave and then doesn't market it. Check. Find a way to safely send astronauts to other planets? Unfortunately, not this time, but investigators tried and it seems like a story that shouldn't be buried as a vague anecdote in a newspaper from years ago. - I think that in many sciences where there is success it is not something scientific. It is an invention, which is something quite different.

And I think I'm personally much more of an inventor than a scientist. -My thanks to James Lovelock for his time. His latest book, "Novacene," is part memoir and part look to the future and there's a link to it in the description. - Oh, that was a mistake. That was... I... Oh, washing that is going to be a nightmare. Alright, well, I guess I won't get a second take, because... I put it on low!