OT: N.H. man who helped develop microwave oven dies

NASHUA, N.H. (AP) — Robert Decareau, who helped invent the processes necessary to create the microwave oven, has died in Nashua.

Decareau, who lived in Amherst, was 82. He died Sunday after suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last 17 years.

According to his family, Decareau was a Massachusetts native who went to work for Raytheon after earning his doctorate in chemistry. It was there that he started working on microwave energy food applications, and he was one of the first to call himself a food scientist.

Decareau’s daughter, Karen Ross of Auburn, Maine, says she remembers her father experimenting with a refrigerator-sized prototype microwave oven in the family’s basement in the 1960s.

*DING* He’s done.