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Fascinating and Lesser Known People Who Changed American History

Khalid Elhassan May 5, 2020 33 min

Normandy landings - Operation Overlord — Men of the 320th in Normandy. YouTube

2. The Man Who Revolutionized How We Eat

American tinkerer and inventor Percy Spencer (1894 – 1970) was not what one would call a highly educated man – he quit school in fifth grade to work in a mill. However, the lack of formal education did not stop him from patenting inventions that contributed to America’s victory in WWII. Nor did it stop him from inventing the microwave oven. As an MIT scientist put it: “The educated scientist knows many things won’t work. Percy doesn’t know what can’t be done“.

In his teens, Spencer was fascinated by and developed a passion for the then-new phenomenon of electricity, so he became an electrician. He joined the US Navy at 18, made himself an expert on radio technology, and by 1939, he was one of the world’s leading experts in radar tube design. It was that expertise that helped Spencer invent the microwave oven.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.