It may seem like a holdout against the solid-state world, but the vacuum-tube magnetron is still at the heart of every consumer microwave oven and many commercial ones used for cooking or drying.

An oven that heats food using microwave radiation. The first microwave oven was demonstrated by Westinghouse at the 1933 World's Fair in Chicago. Its 10-kilowatt shortwave radio transmitter cooked ...

A pocket-size gizmo that puts the "pop" in microwave popcorn could soon fuel particle accelerators of the future. The small but mighty device is a magnetron—a mashup of the words "magnetic" and ...