Putting Science To Work

Microwave Oven
Percy Spencer didn't know better than to bring candy with him into his microwave lab in 1946. When the American engineer, who was developing radar components for the Raytheon Corp., let his chocolate bar get too close to a piece of equipment, it turned into chocolate goo.

Cooking would never be the same. Within a year, Raytheon had introduced the first commercial microwave oven--a clunky, 750-lb. thing that required plumbing to prevent overheating but that managed nonetheless to do the job: heat food by electromagnetically stimulating the water, fat and sugar molecules within it. It was 20 years before Amana introduced a household model, and even then consumers--fearing everything from sterility to brain damage from the unfortunately named "Radarange"--gave the gadget a pass.

By 1975, however, microwave ovens outsold gas ones. Though better known for soggy potatoes than for culinary masterpieces, the microwave has no equal when it comes to reheating coffee or popping popcorn. By 1997, 90% of American households owned one.

The Green Revolution
Two hundred years ago, the English economist Thomas Malthus calculated that the world's population would soon outstrip its food-growing capacity. What he didn't anticipate was Norman Borlaug. Working in Mexico from 1944 to 1960--long before the advent of modern biotechnology--the U.S. biologist developed a hybrid strain of wheat that was enormously more prolific than its natural cousins. Borlaug's "miracle wheat" allowed Mexico to triple its grain production in a matter of years, and when his hybrid was introduced in south Asia in the mid-1960s, wheat yields there jumped 60%. Miracle strains of rice and other grains followed in short order, triggering a global green revolution that put the lie to Malthus' gloomy calculation. For his role in helping stave off world starvation, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1970.

Birth Control Pills
Biologist Gregory Pincus had his hands full in 1950, when the Planned Parenthood organization gave him $30,000 and told him to develop a contraceptive that was "harmless, entirely reliable, and aesthetically satisfactory to husband and wife." Within 10 years, however, Pincus and his colleagues delivered, inventing the drug that sparked the sexual revolution. Introduced in the U.S. in 1960, the birth control pill, known simply as the Pill, was an ovulation-suppressing mix of estrogen and progestin that was 99% effective.

Not surprisingly, the magic contraceptive bullet was an instant best seller. Within five years, 5 million women were taking it, a number that exploded over the next decade as baby boomers reached sexual maturity. Better formulations were soon developed to minimize the danger of blood clots and other worrisome side effects. But some health risks could not be foreseen, and as the 1980s dawned, bringing with it AIDS and a sharp increase in other sexually transmitted diseases, the smart new sexual freedom that the Pill permitted started to seem not so smart. As a result, the humble condom made a comeback in the '90s. As did abstinence.

The Pill and such newer, longer-lasting variants as the Norplant implant and the Depo-Provera injection do endure, however, still-effective survivors of a revolution that seems to be winding down.

Radar
It was one thing for engineers at the start of the century to dream of filling the skies with airplanes and the roads with cars. It was another thing to figure out how to keep all that traffic straight. The solution turned out to be radar, an application of electromagnetic radiation that forever changed the nature of travel, warfare and even space exploration.

In the early 1900s engineers first appreciated how easily radio waves can be bounced off almost any object. In 1925 physicists took advantage of this, firing signals at the ionosphere and using the reflection to measure its altitude. By World War II, British scientists had refined the technology, and the government began to dot the coast of England with civil-defense radar stations. As the hardware got simpler, radar found its way into airplanes, boats and air-traffic-control towers, improving navigation and ensuring that even a cow-pasture airport could operate safely. By the end of the century, the same basic technology was being used to steer spacecraft, track storms and help police catch speeders--proof that even the most arcane science can pay very pedestrian dividends.

Lasers
What good is a brilliantly intense, tightly focused beam of light? It can make a dandy weapon or torture device, as Sean Connery found to his dismay in the James Bond film Goldfinger. But while laser weaponry never really took off, lasers certainly did. Today they are used for, among other things, dentists' drills and delicate eye surgery, recording and playing back compact discs, measuring the distance to the moon, creating and viewing holograms, industrial cutting and welding, sending voices and data through the air and down optical fibers, surveying roads and building sites, generating energy in controlled-nuclear-fusion experiments, "painting" dots on a drum in laser printers and as high-tech pointers in lecture halls.