“With popcorn, it really is that tiny threshold between it's cooked properly and it's burning that makes it such a difficult thing to try and automate. Because if you use the sensor reheat function and you're heating a big plate of leftovers from yesterday's Chinese food, well, if it goes a minute too long, it doesn't really matter ... But if you go a minute too long on popcorn, you've ruined it.”

And then if you watch certain microwave ovens, you'll be able to tell after the bag bursts open, there's five, 10, maybe 15 seconds of a delay, and then a time shows up on the screen because it has calculated that's how much longer I have to go. And then it will stop.

Now, when this humidity sensor works, it works great. But the truth is, it doesn't always work great because the quality of the back-end technology on a microwave varies with the quality of the microwave itself. And even if you have a high-quality machine, over time, the sensors can drift. They can get blocked by grease that builds up in your microwave. And sometimes you just get a lemon and the sensors fail for no reason at all. And this is the core of most of the problems with the popcorn button. Because while these failures may not be a big deal for most of the things you're putting in your microwave, when it comes to popcorn, even small issues with these sensors can become a real problem.

So am I correct in assuming this means you don't use the popcorn button on your microwave?

I mean, I use the popcorn button all the time, but that's because I did the testing to figure out can I trust this thing. And, you know, I'm a weird nerd, so that's the sort of thing that I'm going to do. But the popcorn button, depending on the Different features your microwave was equipped with can work really well. You basically just have to test it for yourself to figure that out. And there is kind of a new technology, which I had read about first and then discovered my microwave actually implements it, which is sometimes they use microphones to actually listen to the popcorn. Oh my God, that's amazing. What a brilliant idea. Yeah, so the instructions on the bag that will tell you, like, wait until you hear two seconds between pops, that is exactly what my microwave does. And I've just been watching it. And I'm assuming it's using the steam sensor as well, but it really is. You hear the popping slowdown. And then once you see that two-second gap, it throws 19 seconds on the screen, but actually it stopped cooking. It's just cooling down.

Chapter 2: A Cultural History of the Popcorn Button. So I'm going to keep it a buck. When we started reporting this part of the story, it was honestly kind of a joke. Alec had answered pretty much all of Suzelle's most pressing questions. And in light of what we learned from him, the rest of her questions felt almost self-evident. But Suzelle had asked us to look into the question of how we got here. And she had raised a theory about a collaborative meeting between the people who make popcorn and the people who make microwaves. And since we had started to feel like maybe microwave popcorn shouldn't have been automated in the first place, we decided to contact the people who created the first popcorn button and ask them about its origins.