Comment Articles

Technology that makes you go 'aaaah'

Rupert Goodwins AnchorDesk

Published: 30 May 2002 17:41 BST

Got a microwave oven? You do, as do over 80 percent of households in the UK, according to the Microwave Technology Association. It's part of the background of domestic life, unremarkable as a toaster, and with a history stretching back to 1945 -- that's when Raytheon turned wartime microwave research into a caterer's cooker called the Radarange.

You wouldn't have had one in 1978, though. That was four years after the introduction of the first kitchen microwave, from Philips, and the point at which most people had heard of them but not many had tried them. It was also the year that World in Action broadcast a programme claiming that microwaves were dangerous. At 8:30 p.m. in the evening of 21 August that year, there was a market for the ovens: at 9:00 p.m., there was not. It took five years after that for the fuss to die down, five years of writs, of people saying they'd gone blind or got cancer from the things: by 1985, penetration was still under 15 percent.

Nobody ever proved microwave ovens are safe. Nobody found a way of putting bumpers on the radiation so it bounced off babies, or rubbing the rough edges off the ends of the waves. People just forgot they were ever worried and -- surprise -- the number of deaths in the UK due to microwave ovens zapping the vitals is still in the order of fatalities due to wombat bites.

You can see where I'm going with this. Microwave ovens operate in a band not too far away from mobile phones, only with around a thousand times as much power. They leak. If you don't look after the door seals, they can leak more than a little. With the right gear, you can detect a microwave nuking a pizza from many miles away: I'd love to see the maps that must exist in the National Reconnaissance Office -- the agency in the US that runs spy satellites -- for 2.4GHz energy radiated from big cities. Compared with the few hundred milliwatts our cellphones disgorge, it's big league. But nobody cares.

I can't say for sure that mobile phones are as safe as microwave ovens -- but what do you think? How about the megawatts radiated from TV transmitters? Radar installations? Where are the studies suggesting cellphone-related illness?