My first encounter with a microwave was at far Bob's in Pasadena. Finals had just ended at Cal Tech and I walked to far Bob's to decompress. I had no knowledge of microwave ovens.
I ordered a piece of cherry pie. Waitress decided to warm it without telling me, using their then-new microwave oven.
The plate was ice cold when she passed it to me. When I bit into a piece of the pie, I burned the bejesus out of my mouth. I yelped and the waitress came running.
She showed me this magic box, which made sense as I'd just finished E&M. She comped me the pie and since it was a slow night (around 2am), we spent an hour testing different foods in the microwave. Bacon layered in paper towels was the clear winner.
The fastest tech revolution I ever saw was in the fall of '75, when I was a frosh. At the beginning of the semester, the Caltech bookstore had slide rules for $125. By December, they were on closeout for $5. Never saw them again. The calculators had arrived!
(Showing my age again. Kids today don't ride bikes to school. All you gotta do is look at the lonely single bike rack at elementary schools. In my day there were lots of racks festooned with bikes. These days when I pass a school, there's a long line of moms in SUVs with the motor running talking on their phones.)
In the USA. But in plenty of other places they do. In fact, at the bike rack of my sons school there is too little place, so some of them overflow onto the school yard.
There are the mothers of kitchen automation:
1. refrigerator
2. garbage disposal
3. dishwasher
4. electric / gas stove and oven
These are really marvelous inventions. It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.
The latter does not exist in Europe so I haven't ever thought it would be an important step in reducing chores. We have bio waste bins for food leftovers which seems pretty efficient already.
In my opinion they provide basically zero value but lots of trouble. They encourage putting all kinds of nastiness down your pipes and in my experience tend to break and leak. But they are virtually ubiquitous here.
But perhaps not as much fun, particularly if you forget to put the lid on?
> It seems I spent half my childhood washing dishes by hand. Ugh.
Yes, I remember that when I left home to go to university, the very first thing my parents did was to buy a dishwasher.
Mind you, I don't have one today - kitchen too small, and I don't like bending down to fill/empty it.
I'm really wondering about the garbage disposal thing and I'll go Google about them.
Because it's hard to justify the $$$ on a robot to automate a job that takes 30 seconds once a week.
Modern people don't realize it, but an awful lot of household drudgery has been automated. I'm old enough to remember life before the microwave. What a marvelous time saver that is! You can even buy one from the thrift store for $10. I remember them being $1000, and that was back when a dollar was worth something.