Personal memory: My parents grocery-shopped in Maynard, Massachusetts, when I was small. Maynard was pretty close to Hanscom AFB in Bedford, home of what we knew as the MIT “RadLab”, where the British experiments with radar were brought over to when it wasn’t a sure bet that Britain would survive.
I must have been no more than 10 when the adjacent hardware store had a radar cooking demonstration. They were heating hot dogs in seconds and handing them out. That would have been 1955 or so. I have the idea that the demo was by Raytheon, but after 65 years.......
A legend has it that the concept of cooking food was triggered by radar operators noticing that birds who flew in front of a powerful radar dropped dead instantly. Flash cooked as it were.
“on October 5, 2007 APS President-elect Arthur Bienenstock presented a plaque to MIT to commemorate the MIT Radiation Laboratory that played a key role in the development of radar during World War II.”