All language subtitles for Tom Scott.James Lovelock at 100.I promise this story about microwaves is interesting.720p

and rolling i can't click bait this

video

i mean i could but it wouldn't really be

fair to anyone involved

i know the title and the thumbnail

aren't going to pull loads of people in

but i hope they can trust me when i say

i promise this story is really

interesting because it is

this is one of the best things i've

found while researching in years

so this starts when i'm looking up old

television shows i'm about three

research tangents deep and

i find this incredible line in a

newspaper article from 1997.

the microwave was invented to meet a

need to heat hamsters humanely

in 1950s laboratories and i read that

and i thought

that's ridiculous no it wasn't

was it there's a well-known story about

the engineer who invented the microwave

percy spencer just after world war ii

was working on one of the new

military-grade radars while it was

active

and he realized that the peanut bar in

his back pocket had melted

which implies that the radar also nearly

cooked part of him as well

unshielded radars are really dangerous

but it was the 1940s the attitude to

safety was a bit more lacks

now it wasn't a surprise that

electromagnetic radiation

could heat stuff that had been known for

a while people have actually been using

it for medical therapies for a while

different wavelengths had different

effects but percy spencer was the first

person to realize

you could cook efficiently with

wavelengths that were put out by radar

and then realized that you could sell

that and then realize

well i could turn that into a usable

product because a massive radar dish is

basically the same technology

as this microwave i'm not going to try

and take this thing apart i'm not

qualified and there is a high voltage

capacitor in here

which can carry enough charge to kill

don't mess about with these

unless you know what you're doing but

inside here is

inside here in the bit you can't access

there's a microwave generator called a

magnetron

it moves an electric current past a big

magnet with a hole in it and because

physics that produces electromagnetic

radiation

tune the size of the hole in the magnet

you get different frequencies of

radiation

the best analogy i've found is that it's

like blowing air over glass bottles and

changing the pitch

by changing the amount of water inside

so

that but with electricity look i don't

have a physics degree

long story short a magnetron converts

electricity into electromagnetic

radiation you send pulses of that

radiation out into the sky and you

listen for the echoes

you've got radar and you've helped to

win world war ii or you could put a

magnetron inside a safe

radiation proof box called a faraday

cage you've tuned the wavelength so that

water absorbs the radiation easily

and you've got a microwave and you can

cook lunch

the technical term is diathermic heating

and less than a year after the melting

peanut bar incident which could so

easily have been like the

cooked hand incident or worse but less

than a year after that

that engineers company defense

contractor raytheon

they released the first commercial

microwave it was called the radar range

it was the size of a fridge it had to be

actively cooled it was

incredibly expensive and it was designed

for big commercial kitchens

that was 1947. the first microwave as we

know it today a cheap box that you plug

in

that was from the late 1960s once

magnetron technology had moved on a bit

at no point in that well-referenced

well-known story

does anyone mention heating hamsters in

laboratories in the 1950s

so that should be pretty easy to

disprove right it's going to be an urban

legend there are a lot of urban legends

like that

so i started doing some journal searches

and pretty quickly i found papers from

the 1950s talking about the reanimation

of frozen rats and hamsters those papers

were written by scientists at the

national institute for medical research

a government laboratory in mill hill in

suburban north london about half a mile

that way

i would have filmed closer to that but

unfortunately it was pulled down a few

years ago and the whole area is now a

load of new build housing anyway

national institute for medical research

in the 1950s

that research included cryobiology the

effects of extreme cold on bodies and

tissue

scientists at that lab froze rats and

hamsters beyond

the point of death they use ice

anabathopropylene glycol which is

airplane de-icer held at below zero

and at that point the animal is dead and

will not recover on its own

no heart rate no breathing core

temperature around one degree celsius

somewhere between ten and fifty percent

of the animal's body water

frozen to ice and then by applying hot

spatulas to the chest or

high intensity hot beams of light the

researchers will try to warm the animals

up and bring them back to life the

success rate wasn't great and the

animals were often left with burns but

it did sometimes work we'll get to why

they were doing that later but by 1955

one of the researchers has the idea to

use a magnetron reasoning that it'd be a

lot more safe and humane to reheat the

whole animal at once rather than risk

burning it

actually i say one of the researchers

there's a name on that paper that might

be a bit familiar

james lovelock one of the last

independent scientists born in 1919

back when scientists could be an entire

job description rather than botanist or

physicist or computational linguist

someone who worked across disciplines on

whatever they found interesting or

whatever they were hired to do

lovelock is best known for inventing

gaia theory the idea of earth as a

self-regulating system

he also invented the electron capture

detector which found cfcs in the

atmosphere and helped discover the ozone

hole

hardware that he helped design for nasa

is sitting on mars because it landed

there with the viking probes

in 1976 and one of the earlier projects

in his career back in the 1950s

was at the national institute for

medical research freezing rats and

hamsters and he had the idea

to use microwave diathermy diathermy

dieth

diathermy to reheat them but the papers

and anecdotes from back then

all seem to contradict each other the

timeline is difficult to piece together

there are reliable sources with

completely different stories and claims

so

i went to ask him about it do you know

you're the first person to come and ask

me about the freezing work

because james lovelock at 101 years old

lives somewhere vaguely around here on

the south coast of england goes for a

walk along the coast every day

and was happy to be interviewed one

biologist audrey smith

was able to revive a hamster that had

been frozen

when they woke up they got a gigantic

burn all across their chest and that

must have been pretty painful

and it was messy i thought this is a

lousy way to do it so i said why didn't

you use dice army

potentialings of my own money i bought

a surplus raf

transmitter joined it up sure enough it

poured out

30 watts at 30 megahertz which is just

about right

and i took it into the lab the next day

and said look here here's your diocernic

i thought this is very untidy made some

inquiries and sure enough there were 10

centimeter magnetrons

that had been invented by bhutan randall

at birmingham university during the war

to get hold of one of those is not easy

and this is where being in the

government department helped a bit

so i just made a few inquiries how do i

get hold and they said oh

they're working on them down at just

above portsmouth

i said any chance of borrowing one of

your magnetrons

and he said oh no he said we can give

you one if you want it's a

you know an interesting cause why not

i've joined this up into

a with a wave guide into a metal box

it wasn't so much a box it was just a

thing made out of

um chicken wire except his finals and

chicken were a bit closer mesh

and that was just like the box of a

microwave oven

and i fed the microwaves into it and i

told audrey now put your hamster in

there

that's a microwave james lovelock may

not have invented the first microwave

but he certainly invented a microwave

the idea of using magnetrons to heat

stuff wasn't his but

no one else was putting one in a faraday

cage box on a desktop big commercial

microwaves for restaurant kitchens

aren't the same thing and besides they

weren't even on sale in the uk until a

few years later i put a potato in it

and baked it and it was perfectly all

right

the safety procedures were um

occasionally a bit lacks by modern

standards

in the course experiments while we were

building it

the thing was running open and

the radiation was bouncing all around

the room and the light bulbs would light

up

without warning the filament just

radio had the same wavelength as the

radiation and it would absorb it and

light

light up and the power

notes were the funniest one they catch

fire

because the metal strip inside was just

about the wavelength of the magnetron

and here's the really amazing thing it

worked

we put the hamster in there frozen solid

and i mean frozen solid it was like a

bit of wood when you dropped it on the

bench

turned up turned the thing up to full

power on the microwave which was

it was about a kilowatt coming out of it

and uh with as a timer

uh and after so many seconds the the

hamster woke up and started wandering

around

do anything to say don't try this at

home i mean there are enough people of

all ages watching that statistically yes

i do need to say it

don't try this at home it's unnecessary

cruelty you won't be doing medical

research you will be doing a crime

context is really important but also the

research has been done

more than 50 years ago there are charts

of survival rate and heating

and it turns out that with a microwave

because that's what this was with a

precise

calibrated microwave and with artificial

respiration to start pumping oxygen

around the body

almost every rodent they froze was

successfully reanimated

that's the word that the biologists used

reanimation healthy behaving as usual

and given a retirement at an animal home

according to one of the papers

back from being frozen to death

sometimes

multiple times so the last question is

why well this could be of immense

importance to

also to medicine itself

for preserving tissues for transfer

and also for blood blood transfusions

because at the moment blood is kept at

the blood bank for

three weeks and then thrown down the

sink imagine if that had worked

on bigger animals back then humanity did

not know what the limits were this was

an open question

the reason that all those 1960s science

fiction writers and comic book authors

had people being frozen in time or

astronauts being sent off in cryosleep

well it might be because for a little

while it looked like that might actually

be possible

if freezing and diathermic reheating

worked on hamsters

then maybe it'd work on rabbits if it

worked on rabbits and maybe it'd work on

primates and if it worked on primates

then maybe it would work on humans it

didn't unfortunately it doesn't scale up

you cannot freeze a human

it's not it's partly a matter

of how quickly you can get

the anti-freeze agent to diffuse into

the cells

humans too big it's just a matter of

size

a hamster is an acceptable size

sometimes research hits a brick wall

find out a neat thing about hamsters

check casually invent a microwave and

then don't commercialize it

check find a way to safely send

astronauts to other planets

not this time unfortunately but the

researchers tried and

it feels like a story that shouldn't be

buried as a vague anecdote in a

newspaper from years ago

i think in in an awful lot of science

where there's a success

is not a a scientific thing

it's an invention which is something

quite different

and i think personally i'm much more of

an inventor than a scientist

my thanks to james lovelock for his time

his latest book nova scene is part

memoir and part look to the future

and there's a link to it in the

description oh that was a mistake

that i

oh that's going to be a nightmare to

watch all right well yes i don't get a

second take because

i put that on low