The 100 Watt Lightbulb Goes Out: Ronald Howes, Easy Bake Oven Inventor, Dies at 83

The original EASY-BAKE used a 100 watt bulb as its heat source. (I always loved the fact that you could bake brownies with a lightbulb.) In its first year, over 500,000 pre-pubescent Duncan Hines wanna-be’s talked their folks into spending $15.95. By its fifth birthday, the EASY-BAKE Oven was a household name.The toy was invented by Ronald Howes Sr, who died yesterday at age 83. According to his obituary , Howes sounds like my sort of guy.

He always had the coolest stuff on earth that I could mess around with,” such as phosphorescent powder he was testing for various glow-in-the-dark applications, his son said.

But Mr. Howes always realized that the Easy-Bake Oven was, in his son’s words, “the big one” in his career. About 20 million Easy-Bake Ovens have been sold since they went on the market in 1963.

Over the years, Mr. Howes’ constant tinkering with possible new products was never confined to office hours. “We no longer have a garage in our house – it’s a physics lab,” his wife said. “You can hardly walk around in it.”