Quote:
Originally Posted by bob91343
I used to eat White Castle hamburgers in the early 1950s and they were well established then.
Actually I don't think the operator of a sandwich cooker necessarily was being cooked. And if he was, he would be sure to notice.
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I guess this one was so powerful, with those four high-power tubes, that it just might have caused some health problems from excessive radiation exposure--at least that's what the seller of this machine seems to think:
The Radio Sandwich Machine
A very rare device this is the
only known surviving example.
one has never been available
before at any auction or shop
this is a true museum peace, and
the history of it is, when this
came out the operator and anybody else nearby was being exposed two radiation.
So the government confiscated them all
for destruction this is why they are so rare
This is in effect one of the very first concepts of The first microwave oven
This device is extremely rare only about 283 made. None survive except for the one you're looking at, thay were originally for world's fairs carnival's and exhibition. the operator placed a hot dog in the top of the tunnel where radio frequency cookd it, unfortunately this also cookd the operator and that's why the u.s. government administration came in to destroy them all. It has 4 big transmitter tubes, and the RF does the cooking. Those fluorescent tubes are not electrically connected, but light up from being inside the field. Needs an external power supply, for both B+, and filaments. btw, if you're standing anywhere near it, when its on, then you're also getting cooked .
BTW, I read in a post following this one that the Radio Sandwich Machine may have been intended primarily for cooking hot dogs, not necessarily hamburgers, and the unit would do said cooking in about 14 seconds. I'm not surprised. There must have been 500 watts or more of RF power radiated from each of those tubes, which almost seem to me as if they might have been intended for a high-power AM broadcast transmitter. Four times 500 equals 2000 (!) watts, more than any commercially made microwave oven. And as I said, the Radio Sandwich Machine must have pulled thousands of watts from the AC line when it was in operation, so any place that had one or used one would be faced with a very large electric bill.
There is always the possibility that the seller was exaggerating beyond belief when he said "you're also getting cooked" when the Radio Sandwich Machine was in operation. I don't know if there were safe limits in the 1930s for radiation from machines such as this, but if there were not (and I don't believe there were), these units were safety hazards from the word go. If the U. S. Government did in fact eventually confiscate and destroy these machines for any reason, including but not limited to the radiation hazard, they did the right thing.
Today there are very strict standards as to radiation leakage from commercially-available microwave ovens, but when the Radio Sandwich Machine was new, I am sure the area of RF radiation was an unregulated "Wild West" sort of thing in which literally anything was possible, the safety (or the lack of it) of the user be darned. By the time Tappan introduced the first consumer-grade microwave in 1954 (followed by Amana's "Radarange" several years later), these issues had been addressed and dealt with, and regulations stating the exact amount of stray radiation allowed from such machines were in effect. Today it is illegal to sell any microwave oven with leakage figures in excess of the federal standards; of course, the Radio Sandwich Machine could not hope to meet, let alone exceed, these standards, which is probably the reason why the government confiscated and destroyed them. The same kind of thing happened with Zenith's "Radio Nurse" wireless intercom system of the late 1930s, although excessive radiation was not the reason these were destroyed in droves to the point where they are extremely rare nowadays, even on eBay or Craigslist. These intercoms were destroyed and production halted due to the name of a Japanese scientist of the '30s being shown prominently (or not so prominently) somewhere on the receiver unit, the chassis or elsewhere.
I don't know if there are any of those systems in existence anymore; like the Radio Sandwich Machine, they exist these days only as bad memories of a bad gone to worse time in American history.
If you have one of either of these, hold on to it, as there will be no replacing them anymore. I am not even sure it is legal to operate a unit such as the Radio Sandwich Machine today, given the unregulated and unlimited radiation levels from that bank of four transmitter tubes; however, with much smaller, more efficient, and safer microwave ovens now available for dirt-cheap (and I mean
cheap) prices these days, the only real use I can see for an archaic behemoth such as the Radio Sandwich Machine would be as a museum piece. As I said in a previous post, the size of the machine itself, plus the power supply, would make it absolutely impractical for use in a modern kitchen, although since the intended market for these were exhibitions such as the 1939 World's Fair in New York, the size issue may not have been a concern, since the machine and its power pack would almost certainly be located in an area well out of sight of the general public. The "Radio Sandwiches" with sparks logo on the front of the machine did not, IMO, do much for the looks of the thing, so it would have been just as well if the unit were kept out of sight.