The humming box in your kitchen owes its existence to a double orphan from rural Maine who left school at twelve to work in a spool mill. Percy Spencer taught himself electrical engineering to wire a paper mill as a teenager, joined the Navy because the Titanic's wireless operators inspired him, and studied calculus on the night watch. By World War II he was one of the world's leading radar tube experts, and a melted candy bar in his pocket changed dinner forever.

This episode traces the philosophy he called "solving my own situation" from the Dickensian childhood through the Raytheon years, where he scaled magnetron production from 100 to 2,600 a day for the Allied war effort. It covers the exploding egg, the first 700-pound microwave, the two-dollar patent bonus he got for one of history's most lucrative inventions, and the question his story leaves behind: what anomalies are the rest of us wiping off our hands and ignoring?

• From spool mill to paper mill: a 16-year-old self-taught electrician with no diploma
• Calculus on the night watch: the Titanic-inspired Navy years that built his toolkit
• 26-fold scale-up: how a man who never saw the boundaries turned bespoke magnetrons into mass production
• The candy bar, the egg, and the Radarange: an accidental discovery others felt and ignored
• "Absorbed physics through his skin": 300 patents, an honorary doctorate, and a two-dollar reward