Ronald Howes

Ronald B. Howes (May 22, 1926 – February 16, 2010) was the American toy inventor, best known for his invention of the Easy-Bake Oven, which was introduced to consumers in 1963.[1]

Ronald B. Howes
Born(1926-05-22)May 22, 1926
DiedFebruary 16, 2010(2010-02-16) (aged 83)
Anderson Township, OH
NationalityAmerican
OccupationInventor
Known forInventor of the Easy-Bake Oven

Biography

Early life

Howes' mother died when he was born. He was raised by his German grandmother and her American husband in Over-the-Rhine, a historic neighborhood in Cincinnati.[1] Howes' family ran a series of small grocery stores in the city during the Great Depression.[1]

Howes taught himself to read before kindergarten.[1] He left Walnut Hills High School during World War II in order to enlist in the United States Navy.[1] He served in the South Pacific during the war before returning to Cincinnati.

He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Cincinnati, where he had already earned some credits while in high school.[1]

Inventions

Howes came up with the idea for the Easy-Bake Oven when he noticed that street vendors kept their food hot by using heat-lamps.[2] In addition to his creation of the Easy-Bake Oven, Howes also was involved in the creation of or refinement to a number of other Kenner Toy products, including Spirograph, Give-a-Show Projector, and Close-and-Play Record Player. Howes died on February 16, 2010 at the age of 83.

gollark: Banking apps use this for """security""", mostly, as well as a bunch of other ones because they can.
gollark: Google has a thing called "SafetyNet" which allows apps to refuse to run on unlocked devices. You might think "well, surely you could just patch apps to not check, or make a fake SafetyNet always say yes". And this does work in some cases, but SafetyNet also uploads lots of data about your device to Google servers and has *them* run some proprietary ineffable checks on it and give a cryptographically signed attestation saying "yes, this is an Approved™ device" or "no, it is not", which the app's backend can check regardless of what your device does.
gollark: The situation is also slightly worse than *that*. Now, there is an open source Play Services reimplementation called microG. You can install this if you're running a custom system image, and it pretends to be (via signature spoofing, a feature which the LineageOS team refuse to add because of entirely false "security" concerns, but which is widely available in some custom ROMs anyway) Google Play Services. Cool and good™, yes? But no, not really. Because if your bootloader is unlocked, a bunch of apps won't work for *other* stupid reasons!
gollark: If you do remove it, half your apps will break, because guess what, they depend on Google Play Services for some arbitrary feature.
gollark: It's also a several hundred megabyte blob with, if I remember right, *every permission*, running constantly with network access (for push notifications). You can't remove it without reflashing/root access, because it's part of the system image on most devices.

References
  1. Horstman, Barry M. (2010-02-19). "Ronald Howes, inventor of Easy-Bake Oven, dies at 83". Cincinnati Enquirer. Archived from the original on 2010-02-23. Retrieved 2010-03-04.
  2. Breselor, Sara (2010-02-28). "Hot young thing: Why we love the Easy-Bake Oven". Chefs and Cooks. Salon.com. Retrieved 2011-02-24. About 50 years ago, walking through New York City, inventor Ronald Howes was struck by the way street vendors kept their food warm using heating lamps. In the cartoon version of this scene, we can see the light bulb from a vendor's cart float to the air above Howes' head, where it pops in a flash of genius. Light bulb ... heat ... cooking ... There among the pretzel carts, Howes conceived of the Easy-Bake Oven, a child-size appliance that uses 100-watt incandescents to bake tiny cakes.


This article is issued from Wikipedia. The text is licensed under Creative Commons - Attribution - Sharealike. Additional terms may apply for the media files.