[Curious Droid] is back with a history lesson on one of the most important inventions of the 20th century: The cavity magnetron. Forged in the fighting of World War II, the cavity magnetron was the ...

It may seem like a holdout against the solid-state world, but the vacuum-tube magnetron is still at the heart of every consumer microwave oven and many commercial ones used for cooking or drying.

A pocket-size gizmo that puts the "pop" in microwave popcorn could soon fuel particle accelerators of the future. The small but mighty device is a magnetron—a mashup of the words "magnetic" and ...

Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, Vol. 58, No. 3 (Sep., 2004), pp. 283-294 (12 pages) The cavity magnetron was invented in Birmingham University and developed by the GEC for ...