Science: Cooked by Radio

Short radio waves, passed through the body of a human being, heat him several degrees above normal temperature, and are used in radiothermal machines to treat such maladies as venereal disease and arthritis. Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Co., which followed General Electric into the radio-thermal field, last week had an announcement to make on the cooking by radio not of human beings but of food.

Cooking a ham with steam has two disadvantages : 1) it takes four or five hours; 2) the ham loses up to 10% of its weight. At Chicopee Falls, Mass., Westinghouse’s radio division put a ham into a short wave machine, cooked it to a “delicate flavor” in 20 minutes. Loss of weight: 3½%.