NASHUA, N.H. (AP) – Robert Decareau, who helped invent the processes necessary to create the microwave oven, has died in Nashua. He was 82.
Decareau, who lived in Amherst, died Sunday after suffering from Alzheimer’s for the last 17 years, his family said.
Decareau was a Massachusetts native who served in the U.S. Navy as an anti-aircraft gunner of the USS Randolph during World War II and then as an Army lieutenant stationed in Austria during the Korean War.
He 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.
“It was massive,” she said. “You could stick a turkey in it.”
Ross said she remembers her dad spending time with ways to cook different foods, including attempts at roasting coffee beans and cooking TV dinners. He also worked for Litton Industries of Palo Alto, Calif., on microwaves.
Decareau later worked at the U.S. Army’s Natick Laboratories developing freeze-drying techniques that would be used to store meals eaten on the battlefield and in space.
He wrote nine books, including “Microwaves in the Food Processing Industry” and “Microwave Processing and Engineering.”
He also was a founding member of the International Microwave Power Institute.
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