Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What company first sold the microwave oven?
The development of the cavity magnetron in the UK made possible the production of electromagnetic waves of a small enough wavelength (microwaves). American engineer Percy Spencer is generally credited with inventing the modern microwave oven after World War II from radar technology developed during the war. Named the "Radarange", it was first sold in 1946. Raytheon later licensed its patents for a home-use microwave oven that was first introduced by Tappan in 1955, but these units were still too large and expensive for general home use. Sharp Corporation introduced the first microwave oven with a turntable between 1964 and 1966. The countertop microwave oven was first introduced in 1967 by the Amana Corporation. After Sharp introduced low-cost microwave ovens affordable for residential use in the late 1970s, their use spread into commercial and residential kitchens around the world. In addition to their use in cooking food, types of microwave ovens are used for heating in many industrial processes.
The Microwave Research Institute (MRI) was founded in 1945 by Ernst Weber at the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn (which later became the Polytechnic Institute of New York University). Research conducted at the institute included work in the areas of "electromagnetic theory, antennas and radiation, network theory and microwave networks, microwave components and devices." MRI was internationally regarded as one of the foremost centers of research on microwave field theory in the world. In 1985 it was renamed the Weber Research Institute in honor of its founder.Among its most prominent members were Nathan Marcuvitz, Leo B. Felsen, Dante C. Youla and Arthur A. Oliner, all fellows of IEEE and members of the National Academy of Engineering. The institute has attracted researchers from all over the world, including Alexander Graham Bell Medal winner Tsuneo Nakahara, who in 1961 was a visiting research associate of the institute, and who went on to be vice chairman of the Sumitomo Electric Company, and Dr. Oguchi, who became chief engineer of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone. Another faculty member closely associated with MRI was KunMo Chung, Director of the Plasma Physics Laboratory from 1967 to 1975, who served as Minister of Science and Technology of South Korea two times and who was associated with numerous international science and technology agencies.
The development of microwave technology during World War 2, such as the klystron and magnetron tubes and parabolic antennas made radiative (far-field) methods practical for the first time, and the first long-distance wireless power transmission was achieved in the 1960s by William C. Brown. In 1964 Brown invented the rectenna which could efficiently convert microwaves to DC power, and in 1964 demonstrated it with the first wireless-powered aircraft, a model helicopter powered by microwaves beamed from the ground. A major motivation for microwave research in the 1970s and 80s was to develop a solar power satellite. Conceived in 1968 by Peter Glaser, this would harvest energy from sunlight using solar cells and beam it down to Earth as microwaves to huge rectennas, which would convert it to electrical energy on the electric power grid. In landmark 1975 experiments as technical director of a JPL/Raytheon program, Brown demonstrated long-range transmission by beaming 475 W of microwave power to a rectenna a mile away, with a microwave to DC conversion efficiency of 54%. At NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory he and Robert Dickinson transmitted 30 kW DC output power across 1.5 km with 2.38 GHz microwaves from a 26 m dish to a 7.3 x 3.5 m rectenna array. The incident-RF to DC conversion efficiency of the rectenna was 80%. In 1983 Japan launched MINIX (Microwave Ionosphere Nonlinear Interaction Experiment), a rocket experiment to test transmission of high power microwaves through the ionosphere.
On the other end the machinery industry supplies consumer goods, including kitchen appliances, refrigerators, washers, dryers and a like. Production of radio and television, however, is generally considered belonging to the electrical equipment industry. The machinery industry itself is a major customer of the steel industry.
Thermal transfer printing was invented by SATO corporation, a Japanese company. They produced the world's first thermal transfer label printer, SATO M-2311, in 1981.The concept of a single-chip microprocessor CPU (central processing unit) was conceived in a 1968 meeting in Japan between Sharp engineer Tadashi Sasaki and an unnamed female software engineering researcher from Nara Women's College. He discussed the concept at a brainstorming meeting that was held in Japan. Sasaki attributes the basic invention to break the chipset of a calculator into four parts with ROM (4001), RAM (4002), shift registers (4003) and CPU (4004) to an unnamed woman, a software engineering researcher from Nara Women's College, who was present at the meeting. Sasaki then had his first meeting with Noyce in 1968. Sasaki discussed the microprocessor concept with Busicom and Intel in 1968, and presented the woman's four-division chipset concept to Intel and Busicom. This provided the basis for the single-chip microprocessor design of the Intel 4004. He was also involved in the development of the Busicom 141-PF desktop calculator which led to the 4004's creation. Sasaki thus played a key role in the creation of the first microprocessor.
He applied for another patent on an alloy he called stainless steel, now known as martensitic stainless steel. The Patent Office rejected his application saying that it was not a new alloy. Haynes conceded their point, but submitted a second application and supplied a sample showing the stainlessness of his alloy when created using his exact proportions of metals, and it was granted. At the urging of his wife, he created the first set of stainless steel silverware for her personal use. The first piece of stainless steel was forged by Homer Dan Farmer in Haynes laboratory. It was a large meat knife and was donated to the Haynes Museum by the family of Dan Heflin, grandson of Homer Dan Farmer. In later years he claimed to have created stainless steel because she did not enjoy polishing their silver tableware. British metallurgist Harry Brearley independently produced an identical alloy around the same time and applied for an American patent and found that one already existed. Brearley had also created other innovations for the metal, but they were of little value without the stainless steel patent. He sought out Haynes and the two decided to pool their findings in a single company to produce the alloy. Haynes sold his stainless steel patent in 1918 to the American Stainless Steel Company, a company Brearley had created with the assistance of investors in Pennsylvania. In exchange he and his estate received royalties on its production until the patent expired in 1930. The stock he received as payment allowed him to gain a seat among the company's board of directors and he installed his son, March, to represent him. The income from the transaction led Haynes to begin the accumulation of a large fortune.
The first widely used solid-state negative resistance device was the tunnel diode, invented in 1957 by Japanese physicist Leo Esaki. Because they have lower parasitic capacitance than vacuum tubes due to their small junction size, diodes can function at higher frequencies, and tunnel diode oscillators proved able to produce power at microwave frequencies, above the range of ordinary vacuum tube oscillators. Its invention set off a search for other negative resistance semiconductor devices for use as microwave oscillators, resulting in the discovery of the IMPATT diode, Gunn diode, TRAPATT diode, and others. In 1969 Kurokawa derived conditions for stability in negative resistance circuits. Currently negative differential resistance diode oscillators are the most widely used sources of microwave energy, and many new negative resistance devices have been discovered in recent decades.
The development of transistors in 1948 by Bell Laboratories led to major improvements to the hearing aid. The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley. Transistors were created to replace vacuum tubes; they were small, required less battery power and had less distortion and heat than their predecessor. These vacuum tubes were typically hot and fragile, so the transistor was the ideal replacement.The 1952 Sonotone 1010 used a transistor stage along with vacuum tubes, to extend battery life. The size of these transistors led to developments in miniature, carbon microphones. These microphones could be mounted on various items, even eyeglasses. In 1951, Raytheon manufactured the transistor and was one of the first companies to mass-produce transistors to throughout America. Raytheon realized that their hearing aid only lasted short-term and began to sell the vacuum-tube hearing aids again along with transistor hearing aids.
The process was invented in Hanau, Germany in 1917. Heraeus Vacuumschmelze and Dr. Wilhelm Rohn applied for a patent on vacuum melting on 12 January 1918 and were granted a German patent DE 345161. E.F. Northrup built the first prototype of a vacuum induction furnace in the United States of America in 1920. Medium frequency furnaces were seen soon afterwards in England and Sweden in 1927. The process was initially developed to refine certain special metals such as cobalt and nickel. As these metals and alloys became more common, the process of VIM became more widely used. VIM now helps to melt a variety of metals for aircraft and nuclear applications.
Modern air conditioning emerged from advances in chemistry during the 19th century, and the first large-scale electrical air conditioning was invented and used in 1902 by US inventor Willis Carrier. The introduction of residential air conditioning in the 1920s helped enable the great migration to the Sun Belt in the United States.
Invented in 1892 by Sir James Dewar, a scientist at Oxford University, the "vacuum flask" was not manufactured for commercial use until 1904, when two German glass blowers, "Reinhold Burger" and "Albert Aschenbrenner," formed Thermos GmbH. They held a contest to name the "vacuum flask" and a resident of Munich submitted "Thermos," which came from the Greek word "therme," meaning "heat."
In 1902, the first modern electrical air conditioning unit was invented by Willis Carrier in Buffalo, New York. After graduating from Cornell University, Carrier found a job at the Buffalo Forge Company. There, he began experimenting with air conditioning as a way to solve an application problem for the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing and Publishing Company in Brooklyn, New York. The first air conditioner, designed and built in Buffalo by Carrier, began working on 17 July 1902.
Porcelain was used in the first ceramic capacitors. In the early years of Marconi's wireless transmitting apparatus porcelain capacitors were used for high voltage and high frequency application in the transmitters. On the receiver side smaller mica capacitors were used for resonant circuits. Mica dielectric capacitors were invented in 1909 by William Dubilier. Prior to World War II, mica was the most common dielectric for capacitors in the United States.
The chip design started in April 1970, when Federico Faggin joined Intel, and was completed under his leadership in January 1971. The first commercial sale of the fully operational 4004 occurred in March 1971 to Busicom Corp. of Japan for which it was originally designed and built as a custom chip. In mid-November of the same year, with the prophetic ad "Announcing a new era in integrated electronics", the 4004 was made commercially available to the general market. The 4004 was the first commercially available monolithic processor, fully integrated in one small chip. Such a feat of integration was made possible by the use of the then-new silicon gate technology for integrated circuits, originally developed by Faggin (with Tom Klein) at Fairchild Semiconductor in 1968, which allowed twice the number of random-logic transistors and an increase in speed by a factor of five compared to the incumbent MOS aluminum gate technology. Faggin also invented the bootstrap load with silicon gate and the “buried contact”, improving speed and circuit density compared with aluminum gate.
Warren S. Johnson (1847–1911) of Wisconsin patented a bi-metal room thermostat in 1883, and two years later filed a patent for the first multi-zone thermostatic control system.
Albert Butz (1849–1905) invented the electric thermostat and patented it in 1886.
TTL was invented in 1961 by James L. Buie of TRW, which declared it, "particularly suited to the newly developing integrated circuit design technology." The original name for TTL was "transistor-coupled transistor logic" (TCTL). The first commercial integrated-circuit TTL devices were manufactured by Sylvania in 1963, called the Sylvania Universal High-Level Logic family (SUHL). The Sylvania parts were used in the controls of the Phoenix missile. TTL became popular with electronic systems designers after Texas Instruments introduced the 5400 series of ICs, with military temperature range, in 1964 and the later 7400 series, specified over a narrower range and with inexpensive plastic packages, in 1966.
In 1951, McDermott, along with Cecil Howard Green, Patrick E. Haggerty, and J. Erik Jonsson co-founded Texas Instruments. This was done when the company changed its name to Texas Instruments; GSI becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of the new company. This acknowledged that the company had changed its focus from one primarily devoted to oil exploration to one focused on manufacturing. McDermott was the Chairman of TI from 1951-1957, Chairman of the Executive Committee of Board of Directors from 1957-1964 and Director until his death in 1973. During this period of time, Texas Instruments rose to be one of the world's largest corporations.
In 1874, German scientist Karl Ferdinand Braun discovered the "unilateral conduction" across a contact between a metal and a mineral. Indian scientist Jagadish Chandra Bose was the first to use a crystal for detecting radio waves in 1894. The crystal detector was developed into a practical device for wireless telegraphy by Greenleaf Whittier Pickard, who invented a silicon crystal detector in 1903 and received a patent for it on November 20, 1906. Other experimenters tried a variety of other minerals as detectors. Semiconductor principles were unknown to the developers of these early rectifiers. During the 1930s understanding of physics advanced and in the mid 1930s researchers at Bell Telephone Laboratories recognized the potential of the crystal detector for application in microwave technology. Researchers at Bell Labs, Western Electric, MIT, Purdue and in the UK intensively developed point-contact diodes ("crystal rectifiers" or "crystal diodes") during World War II for application in radar. After World War II, AT&T used these in their microwave towers that criss-crossed the United States, and many radar sets use them even in the 21st century. In 1946, Sylvania began offering the 1N34 crystal diode. During the early 1950s, junction diodes were developed.
In 1969, Harris Corporation acquired RF Communications and Farinon Electric Corporation, furthering its microwave assets. The printing operations were sold off in 1983 and are now known as GSS Printing Equipment. GSS Printing Equipment later acquired Lanier Worldwide, which itself was spun off from Harris Corporation in the late 1990s.
The first microphone that enabled proper voice telephony was the (loose-contact) carbon microphone (then called transmitter). This was independently developed around 1878 by David Edward Hughes in England and Emile Berliner and Thomas Edison in the US. Although Edison was awarded the first patent in mid-1877, Hughes had demonstrated his working device in front of many witnesses some years earlier, and most historians credit him with its invention.
Swiss electrical engineer George de Mestral invented his first touch fastener when, in 1941, he went for a walk in the woods and wondered why Burdock seeds clung to his coat and dog. He discovered it could be turned into something useful. He patented it in 1955 and subsequently refined and developed its practical manufacture until its commercial introduction in the late 1950s.
In 1955 Joseph McVicker tested a wallpaper cleaner in Cincinnati schools, eventually becoming known as the product Play-Doh. The same year the Tappan Stove Company created the first microwave oven made for commercial, home use. James Spangler invented the first commercially successful portable vacuum cleaner, which he sold to The Hoover Company.
Raytheon filed a patent on October 8, 1945 for a microwave cooking oven, eventually named the Radarange. In 1947, the first commercially produced microwave oven was about 6 feet tall, weighed about 750 lbs, and cost about 5,000 US$. In 1967 the first relatively affordable ($495) and reasonably sized (counter-top) microwave oven was available for sale.
A microwave oven cooks or heats food by dielectric heating. Cooking food with microwaves was discovered by Percy Spencer on October 8, 1945, while building magnetrons for radar sets at Raytheon. Spencer was working on an active radar set when he noticed a strange sensation, and saw that a peanut candy bar he had in his pocket started to melt. Although he was not the first to notice this phenomenon, as the holder of 120 patents, Spencer was no stranger to discovery and experiment, and realized what was happening. The radar had melted his candy bar with microwaves. The first food to be deliberately cooked with microwaves was popcorn, and the second was an egg. In 1947, Raytheon under Percy Spencer demonstrated the world's first microwave oven built at the company which was called the "Radarange".
In the 1960s, Litton bought Studebaker's Franklin Manufacturing assets, which had been manufacturing magnetrons and building and selling microwave ovens similar to the Radarange. Litton then developed a new configuration of the microwave: the short, wide shape that is now common. The magnetron feed was also unique. This resulted in an oven that could survive a no-load condition: an empty microwave oven where there is nothing to absorb the microwaves. The new oven was shown at a trade show in Chicago, and helped begin a rapid growth of the market for home microwave ovens. Sales volume of 40,000 units for the U.S. industry in 1970 grew to one million by 1975. Market penetration was faster in Japan, due to a re-engineered magnetron allowing for less expensive units.
Several other companies joined in the market, and for a time most systems were built by defense contractors, who were most familiar with the magnetron. Litton was particularly well known in the restaurant business.