Hello and thank you for downloading witness with me, Charles Casapolo.

Today I'm taking you back to 1967 when microwave ovens first became widely available in the United States, but microwave technology had been around for

almost two decades by the time the ovens made it into ordinary kitchens.

Now at this history-making moment in which man has first landed on the moon,

microwave cooking units like those in the NASA lunar receiving laboratory and this

test kitchen are indeed revolutionary.

Keep your eye on the chocolate cupcake.

It rises faster than you can eat it.

In 1967, Microways really did seem like space age technology.

But they first took off when a major military technology company Raytheon

launched domestic microwave ovens which were small enough for kitchens and

relatively affordable.

I've been speaking to Dr. John Ocepchuk, an engineer who worked at Raytheon who still remembers the day they were launched.

The magic moment simply was that in 1967 the Raytheon Company arranged to have a meeting at a

restaurant famous restaurant in Boston about this new product, the microwave oven.

The Raytheon made the announcement that here we have a countertop microwave oven for the home

that's going to revolutionize the industry and it sure did because in succeeding years

the sales increased logarithmically until in a few years it was 10 million ovens per year.

They were not lower than engineers.

They know that they had a winner.

But not everybody loved the microwave straight away.

Some critics said, you know, it doesn't cook very well.

...