While vacuum electronic devices have largely been superseded over much of consumer electronics, there’s one place where they can still be found for now. The cavity magnetron is a power RF oscillator ...

If you say that you’re “nuking” something, pretty much everyone will know that you mean you’re heating something in the microwave. It’s technically incorrect, of course, as the magnetron inside 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.

The cavity magnetron was invented in Birmingham University and developed by the GEC for centimetric radar in World War II. Its existence was kept secret, and its deployment was delayed, in the belief ...