Human-sized microwave ovens

March 20, 2006 11:02 AM

Is there such a thing as a "walk-in" microwave oven?

The rather interesting noise my company's elevator makes reminds me of an old episode of Millennium, where people were roasted alive in an "industrial-size" microwave oven. Do such things actually exist, and if so, what are they used for? How easy might it be to retrofit an elevator car into such a device?

posted by halespawn to Grab Bag (10 answers total)

Eleanor Adair has put monkeys and people in so-called microwave chambers.
posted by vacapinta at 11:13 AM on March 20, 2006 [1 favorite]

these are nothing like elevators, but they are industrial scale microwaves. If I understand the description right, the micrwaves are radiated in a plane instead of to fill a volume.

Lots more hits for that type of thing with google search "industrial microwave".
posted by jepler at 11:32 AM on March 20, 2006

An old office building I worked in had glass elevators that were always super hot due to exposure to the sun. We called them "walk-in" microwaves and I still think glass elevators that way.
posted by DragonBoy at 11:34 AM on March 20, 2006

don't miss the INDUSTRIAL MICROWAVE
BACON COOKING SYSTEM

"A system comprised of two MMB-3 oven cavities and three Microdry Model IV-75, 75kW microwave transmitters would produce eleven hundred pounds of fully cooked product per hour."
posted by jepler at 11:34 AM on March 20, 2006

I saw an x-files episode where Skinner was put in a huge microwave (or was Mulder?). I wondered at the time how long it would take to cook him. He was let out within a few minutes, but surely some harm had come to him. I wonder what that would do to a body?
posted by ashbury at 11:44 AM on March 20, 2006

Another pop culture reference: I remember an episode of the Man From Atlantis (70s TV show) where a super-villain placed huge microwave oven transmitters at the poles and was going to melt the polar ice caps. I've always wondered why we couldn't build these and use them to terraform Mars.
posted by stevis at 12:06 PM on March 20, 2006

I saw an article some many years back about a company that was developing whole-house heating systems using microwaves.

I guess that was before the cataracts link was known.
posted by StickyCarpet at 12:13 PM on March 20, 2006

Tokamak fusion reactors like JET and ITER use microwaves to heat the plasma and both are certainly large enough to walk in.
posted by atrazine at 12:25 PM on March 20, 2006

Or you could just go stand in front of a radar antenna, like the (possibly apocrpyhal) story of military flyers in some arctic clime used to do, snapping pictures of themselves standing outdoors in their skivvies to send back home. Unbeknownst to the recipient, just off-camera was the base radar antenna...
posted by kindall at 3:11 PM on March 20, 2006

I know I wouldn't want to be in a walk-in microwave... cancer, cataracts, etc. But, if you wanted to retrofit something to be one, you could probably do it by ripping a few magnetrons out of old microwaves and wiring them up...
posted by fvox13 at 8:27 PM on March 20, 2006