The Death Ray, Part 1

what catastrophe had caused its destruction. Welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and today we are going to be talking about death rays. Now on this show, we we've talked about a lot of very real, in some cases very mundane yet interesting inventions, things like chopsticks or less mundane things like the X ray machine. But today we wanted to talk about an invention that sort of exists throughout its entire lifetime at

the crossroads of myth and legend and reality. Yeah, this is a curious one. This is This is perhaps our first topic where we cannot point at the thing and say here it is, here is the here's the invention. Let us explore its history. Now we all know today I mean, we are at a point where maybe we do risk the topic becoming somewhat mundane because everybody knows about lasers now, you know, this is the twenty one century. Laser research is going on all the time. Yeah, I mean,

and certainly as well explore a little bit there. There have been large scale military projects that have looked at the use of of particle and beam and laser technology to uh to inflict damage too. But but we have not reached the point of the classic sci fi death ray.

We haven't reached the point where a a a beam based weapon is targeting a city or shooting you know, an airplane out of the sky, or being you know, used in bank robberies by high tech bandits, that sort of thing, at least not in a large scale And there might be some very good reasons for that, not just that like we don't have the technology to do it, but maybe because you know, they are easier ways to accomplish the same goal. But yeah, so we're gonna be

talking about death rays. And this turned out, I think to be a much more interesting and culturally relevant topic than I would have expected. Because I'm gonna startup positing something essentially that what people have in mind when they talk about a death ray. What we often have in mind is like a directed energy weapon of some kind, you know, something that shoots a beam of electromagnetic radiation or some other kind of directed energy at a target

to cause it damage or disable it somehow. Uh, I would pose it that. Essentially, this idea grows out of the concept to a magic Wand that's funny because at the same time, I feel like the sci fi vision of the blaster and the phaser and these various weapons they end up informing the way that magic wands are utilized in the Harry Potter films, especially the latter the latter films, where where they're having these large scale wand battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil,

and it's you know, it's it's wonderful. But if you if you look at it, you can you can easily see this is essentially a laser battle. This These are blasters. Yeah, And if you go back into mythology, they're all kinds of concepts of like a weapon that can kill at a distance without a projectile, right, that's essentially what we're

talking about. You can hit somebody from far away without actually throwing anything, right, Yeah, so some of the classic examples, and certainly we can't cover them all here, but you can think of say the Medusa the gorgon's gaze, right, or or or that of the mythic basilisk, the idea that it can kill or petro fy uh, anybody who looks upon it. It's almost the idea of a visible light death ray, like like a visible light frequency image

that could kill you or harm you. Right. Of course, we always have to remember that the sun is the original death ray, right, it just works that it usually works at a slower pace. But all these are kind of they're getting into the idea of either a visible

beam or very often unseen energy unseen death that is projected. Now, of course, fire breathing monsters are common to all kinds of fiction, but I would almost say, could you say that actually a fire breathing dragon is given it's it's a more conventional projectile because fire is like, you know, it's a chemical reaction of matter. It's heated gas and stuff like that. So if you're breathing fire on something,

it's that's sort of a kind of projectile. It was you know, even if it's not scientifically understood by by by ancient people's like fire is. I mean, it's such a part of human life, right, it's it's, it's, it's, it's it's not this this mysterious property that we see in these these in these other myths were discussing and in the sci fi vision of the of the blaster or the death ray. Now, in a recent episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we devoted two episodes to

the Ark of the Covenant and its alleged powers of destruction. Now, I can't remember, did anybody ever suggest that the arc like shot laser beams or death rays. Um, well, Steven Spielberg and George Lucas did, because that's that's where you get that, That's where I'm getting that. But but certainly in some of the myths, you know, as we just floored in that episode, something seems to be emitted by

the arc, And I get I didn't we don't. Don't think we ran across anybody saying that there were rays of death emitted from the ARC, but you know, you could make that argument, I guess now. I think I recalled that the main issues discussed in like the legends that appear in the Bible, are like fire coming out of it at people, or a just inflicting medical misery on people with plagues of m rods and mice. Now, one of my favorite tales of some sort of deadly

beam uh actually comes to us from Irish mythology. I remember reading about this one as as a kid and just being blown away by it. I tell me, well, it's the story of the Famorian king Balor. He had but a single eye in the center of his head, and it's just a single glance from this I would destroy any mortal. And he gained this power by by

peering into a druid's cauldron as a child. Now, even as a child who apparently only had one eye, but by gazing into the cauldron, all of the venomous vapor and the druids cauldron infected his eye and caused it to grow and grow in its power. Now, fortunately for the mortal world, his eyelid grew so large that eventually four men had to raise it up by the use of a cross beam in order to deploy his deadly

gaze in battle. So he was like like a walking piece of of like like a cannon, you know, like he has to be I like to imagine he has to be kind of rolled out on a cart, and then people have to raise up the eyebrow and then anything within range just dies instantly. This sounds like the actual inspiration for Cyclops and the X Men. Yeah, it's it's basically Cyclops, except I don't know that there's an actual,

like visible beam that comes out right. So there's a there's a fabulous tale of how the the hero lugged the long handed who actually is lugged the long hand? Yeah, he's got long hands. He's actually Balor, his own grandson, who's prophesies to one day slay his grandfather. So he

has to go up against Balor. Of course it's faded, but he does so by first of all staying out of the eyes range until the eyelid becomes so wary that it just has to close, and then he moves in and he waits till the split second when Bowler's i is open just enough for him to send a stone through with his slingshot, but not wide enough off that the full awful power of the gaze is unleashed, and so he lets fly the stone from his sling shot, and he sends it through the eye, back through Balor's

brain out the back of his head, and such is the force of this, uh the sling shot missile that it then kills twenty seven warriors standing behind Balor. Going back to the Indiana Jones analogy, it's like when he uses that German pistol and it shoots through like four nazis exactly. Yeah, it's it's the same scenario. So it kills Balor, takes out the eye soldiers lined up behind him. I thought you were going to say that Lug the Longhanded was the first hero of mythology to defeat the

monster by using the technology of pepper spray. Well, you know, he's got that big lid, so I guess he's kind of protected from it, right, But that would keep it closed, right, So you pepper spray Balor and then he tears up. He can't open his eye to look at you with the killer with the death rays, so you're you know, you can basically have free rain. Well, I guess it comes down to to range, though, what has greater range

a slingshot or pepper spray. I think the slingshot probably gave him the advantage because remember that's a good point. He has to stay out of range, and then he has to he has to rush up, and he only has that split second to get the stone through before the the eye is open all the way and then he's toast. Now, another form of ancient death ray that's often been reported is uh I would say again, at the crossroads. The ones we've been talking about so far

clearly myth. You know, these are obviously myth and legend. The next one is more at this crossroads of of legend and reality. We don't know to what extent this story is true, but it has been reported as if it were true. And this is the story of the death ray of our Coimedes. That's right. Archimedes refresher for everyone who was a Greek poly math who lived in the city state of Syracuse. And he was of course an inventor as well. If you're a Greek poly math,

you're you're probably inventing stuff. He's credited with all kinds of interesting discoveries like the water screw, you know, an efficient method for raising water by turning a screw through a pipe. Right, And then he's also credited with Archimedes principle. This is from, for instance, on floating bodies. From any object wholly or partially immersed in a fluid is buoyed up by the force equal to the weight of the

fluid displaced by the object. The old story, of course, is that he was taking a bath and then when he realizes what's happening, how he's displacing the water, he jumps out of the bath and yells, what was it Eureka's castle? Eureka. Uh yeah, that's where we get the word Eureka. Does that phrase actually mean something? I'm sure it does. You know, I've never actually looked into it. Oh, I just looked it up. It means I found it

little disappointing. I I always just think of Eureka Alerts, which is the website that distributes press release has done upcoming science papers. Yeah, which perhaps Archimedes had access to somehow. That's that's the true Maria's machine. Through his time machine, he was able to access Eureka Alerts. And boy was he ever breaking embargo on this release is Antellia by thousands of years? Uh so, yeah, so we know that Archimedes he was He wrote on geometry and mathematics, and

you know these kind of principles. But but let's talk about his his supposed technological creations, right. Yeah, So he's he's lives in Syracuse, again, the Greek city state, and of course he was called upon to build weapons from time to time, so he designed catapults. He said to have created the claw of Archimedes, which would allegedly grab warships out of the water and lift them up, kind

of a war crane. I think, I think this is also in dispute whether that actually happened, right, yeah, but if it did, it would it would essentially be like the claw machine at the you know, at the at the the the arcade that grabs the stuffed animals, except he would be using it to grab ships during a siege. Yeah. But so we get to this idea of the death

ray that Archimedes supposedly built. It's not again known whether he really built such a thing or even if it would have been possible with the material conditions that our committees would have been working with. But some ancient chroniclers report that during the Siege of Syracuse, our committees burned enemy ships in the water, and that you did this with the use of some kind of glass or mirror. Yeah,

this would have been to twelve BC. And uh. The weird thing, of course is that nobody was immediately writing about or at least those writings haven't survived. We mainly know about it from the likes of Galen writing about it three and fifty years afterwards. And yeah, there's absolutely no certainty that this is anything other than a story. It's often dismissed as myth, but numerous attempts have been made to produce this sort of result via mirrors, looking

into the idea, well, could you do it? Could you get enough mirrors? Could you use them to redirect and focus the rays of the sun and with such intensity that you could, uh, you could set a ship ablaze. It would essentially be the magnifying glass on the ant effect, except it would use tons of of polished metal imp elements or mirrors of some kind of reflective glass to shine the sunlight back onto a to a ship in a very focused way, maybe involving hundreds of these things.

And there have been, like you said, a lot of attempts to try to do this. That there was like a MythBusters episode about it, and yeah, I think they tried it like three different times and they failed to

produce results, but other attempts have been more successful. There was a two thousand five in my tea experiment that used a hundred and twenty seven mirrors to position an X on a wooden target ship, a ship that was we should point out was not in the water, but it was just like setting out a parking lot or something.

There's a prop ship. Yeah. They found that they used ten minutes to aim the mirrors, resulting in almost immediate smoke, and then via continuous adjustment of me of the mirrors to refine focus, they managed to produce smoke and fire, so they concluded that such a method was at least feasible. Now, there was an earlier experiment from seventy three, a Greek experiment.

They use seventy different mirrors, each one about five by three feet, and they use them in the hands of soldiers to concentrate the beams of light to set a floating rowboat ablaze, this opposed to a stationary test boat as in that in my t experiment. And this of course is key because you have you have to concentrate, you have to concentrate your sunlight on that object. And

even during calm weather, a ship is going to be bobbing. Now, another thing is to consider the distance of a ship that's going to be bobbing in the water, because the farther away it is, the harder it's going to be to focus all your mirrors in the same place. I mean, imagine like trying to use a huge magnifying glass on

an ant from like hundreds of feet away. Yeah. Now, in the writings about Archimedes death ray, generally were they were attributed to to being within bow and arrow range, and in ancient Greece that would be somewhere between two hundred to a thousand feet or sixty point nine eights. Now, if you think about that, then you might have to wonder, like, well, wait a minute, if they were trying to set ships

on fire, why didn't they just like shoot flaming arrows? Yeah, this is Yeah, there are a number of problems with this. So there's the focusing, there's the fact that the ship is bobbing. There's there's the fact that nobody's writing about

the success of this thing. I think back to our stuff to Blow your Mind episode on Greek fire, which certainly made an impression was a terror weapon was was a state secret and was effective, and people people spoke of it in horror, but not so with the Death Ray. People were not talking about it to like three fifty

years after the fact that we know of. My take on this, based on what I've been reading, is that this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that somebody like our comedes might have at least tried to do during a long siege. There's a lot of setting around, there's probably a lot you imagine a mind like that of our comedies. He's probably thinking, well, what can we do? Could we you know, we could shoot some more arrows, we could fire up the catapult again, what if I

could focus the rays of the sun. That's interesting, So like you could recast this not as a defensive tactic, but as an experiment. Had the opportunity to try it out, So why not try it right? And then during a siege, you know, hopefully he does catch the enemy ships on fire, you know, and I can imagine that that the military would say, oh, sure, yeah, to have to take as many soldiers as you want. They're just setting around waiting for something to happen. Anyway, and if you can set

the Roman ships on fire, go for it. I guess if this did happen in any form at all, we don't know how many attempts it took for it to be successful, right, you know. I mean, maybe it's a situation where hey produced a little smoke and then they figured it out. Maybe they actually caught a ship on fire. But again, it seems like if it had really been effective, it would have become a standard weapon of war, and

it did not. Yeah, and now this concept is basically in the bullpark of what is actually meant when people talk about modern technology magical visions of death rays, right, it's some kind of beam or directed energy weapon that causes physical damage or disables machines at a distance. Now, machines can't die, though, so why aren't we still kind of a death ray? It just sounds sexier than um,

what uh machine malfunction ray. I want to be very clear, I did not decide to call these things death rays. Death ray is a term of art in the death ray industry and the death ray marketing industry, and you will find all throughout history that these items are in fact marketed in the press as death rays. So that's don't put that on me. All right, Well, let's get into the death rays. We we've talked about what came before. We've talked about the myth and at least half mythological

stories of early death rays. Uh, certainly laying the groundwork for the idea. But at what point, then do we see something new in the pursuit of the death ray? Well, I mean, one way of asking that question is where

does the desire for a death ray come from? Like, so we're going to be discussing how newspaper articles and con artists and inventors were constantly gabbing about death rays from say, the late eighteen hundreds until World War two roughly, especially at the period between the two world wars, like the nineteen twenties and thirties, that was like death ray

fever hot zone. But didn't we already have enough guns and bombs and weapons to satisfy us, Like there were plenty of means available to cause destruction, to destroy people and vehicles, Like why were people so obsessed with this idea of a death ray? And so I think we should try to explore that a little bit, and that might give us a window into what's going on when

we discussed these these actual reports of what inventors were claiming. Well, some of the answers we're gonna get into are definitely more intriguing than this one. But the one of the obvious answers that comes to mind is humans cannot create, cannot discover a new technology or develop a new technolo oology without thinking about ways to utilize it in war. That's true, so that it's just inevitable to a certain extent. We're discovering waves, and then it's the question is how

can we start killing people with these ways, with these rays. Yeah, around the turn of the twentieth century, like in the eight nineties we had the discovery of X rays, people were discovering all different kinds of ways for energy to propagate wirelessly across distance. And Yeah, of course, the more we knew about that, it had that sexiness of being a cutting edge scientific discovery. Of course, people were thinking like,

how can I use this for war? How can we get the international military edge by using what we now know about wireless energy transmission? Yeah, and then later on during the Cold War, we we we also see that the same sort of energy going into things that totally don't shake out, like the idea of of remote viewing and various psychic phenomena. Exactly. Yeah, we we've discussed on

stuff to blow your mind before. How uh you know, I don't put any stock in the idea of psychic powers as a reality, but psychic research absolutely did take place during the Cold War, definitely on on the United States side, Like we know about the US government funded psychic research projects. Yeah, the idea being if there's something there, then we want to know about it because that we because the enemy is going to look into it as well. And you do see a similar energy in the pursuit

of the death ray. Absolutely. So here's one thing you might assume. You know that there were all these articles about scientists claiming to have invented a death ray from say, you know, the late eighteen hundreds and really picking up after World War One, going through the twenties and thirties. What what might have caused that? You might think, Oh,

the rise of science fiction. Yeah, like that. That seems like it would be an obvious answer because we we do see some of that when it comes to spade a space exploration. We see so many of the advances in rockets ran rocketry during the twentieth century are created by individuals who were inspired by science fiction. Yeah, so that is a totally natural thing to assume might be

going on with death rays. But I want to mention a book that I've been reading that was actually I'd say this is our our best and main source in this episode as a book called death Rays and the Popular Media eighteen seventy six to nineteen thirty nine, a study of directed energy weapons in fact, fiction, and film by William J. Fanning Jr. McFarland Press from and this

book is really interesting. It explores the relationship between sort of popular culture representations of death rays and death rays as existing or as people claim to exist or claim to be working on in the real world, and he makes a very compelling case that the relationship goes exactly the opposite way. So you've got this period of science fiction in the nineteen twenties and thirties known as the

ray gun era of science fiction. Ray guns are everywhere, But he says, in fact, it's not that the newspapers were pulling all this ray gun hype from sci fi, but the fictional stories were pulling the ray gun hype from reality from the newspapers. And that's crazy. I just always assumed it to be the opposite, as as s later like there's a there's a cheapness to the ray

gun effect, especially in these old cereals. Well you just think, well that that just it's a perfect you know, cheap fictionalized weapon because you don't have to you don't have to worry about there the fact that it doesn't look like there was a gun shot. You don't have to even worry about a fancy beam effect or anything. You don't have to actually discharge a weapon on stage or on set. You just go pu pu, and you're good.

I mean, it's brilliantly convenient for all kinds of reasons, for you know, sensorious reasons having to do with not wanting to see blood and all that, and for cheapness reasons. It's just incredibly useful if you're trying to be an

economical creator of science fiction. But yeah, there is this other direction in the relationship where it seems that a lot of this sci fi is it's kind of like how you know, a lot of there's that sort of mild sci fi, the sci fi that you might see in like military thriller movies that are not like super they don't have time machines and stuff like that. They've just got like slightly more advanced than we actually have

today weapons and stuff. It's like when there was there were talk of railguns, and then then you have that Arnold Swartzenegger movie what was it Eracer I think where it prominently features railguns. I never saw that, Oh what has great railguns in it? Yeah? And Arnold Schwarzenegger, is that the one I heard of where he at one

point shoots an alligator and says, your luggage. I literally only remember the railguns the only thing I remember from that movie, but it was but it definitely felt like a similar scenario if only railguns had caught on more. I think to a certain extent they did because you started seeing them in video games everywhere around that time as well. Robert I could talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger all day. We got to get back to the ray gun era.

So the ray gun era, uh yeah. So there's this idea that for some reason everybody in the press is really excited about the idea of of death rays, and there's a there's a really interesting cultural and political reason that this kind of thing was popular in the nineteen twenties and thirties, and it had to do with the idea of the next war. Now we've you know, explored many times how there was a way in which the First World War was a kind of new and unique terror.

There had always been horrible wars and were you know, war always kills, war is always awful. But the First World War, mainly, I think for technological reasons, was was shocking in the kind of terror it presented. That's right. It was a war in which we had these dehumanizing machines, We had these these these terrifying chemicals, these chemical agents that were deployed. We had bombs falling from the sky. It was it was just technology used to just terror

humanity apart. Yeah, And and the biggest changes I think that we're lingering in the in the consciousness of people who survived the First World War where knowledge of the idea of of air bombing, air power as a weapon of war, which when you think about it now, that seems like, you know, we all grew up with the idea of an air force being part of a nation's military, but this was new at the time, you know, having an air force that could fly planes over your city

and bomb the civilians in the city. It completely reversed the dynamics of war. Now it's saying, Okay, the civilians back home are now on the front lines. Like air power introduced an entirely new theater of combat, entirely new layer of strategy, and and yeah, that allowed just anybody living in any given city to suddenly be a casualty and casualty in that war with without there being a full invasion. Right, people way back home could think, I don't have to go to war to be in danger.

I could be in my house and someone could drop a mustard gas attack on me and my family while we're way back home. Uh. And it's because you're basically always within reach of the bomber. The comer can go anywhere. So Fanning points out that books and articles at the time, in the twenties and thirties just would constantly work over these lurid imaginings of what this horrible next war would

be like. And it involved these new elements that we, you know, that we had put to use in the First World War, but just at a much more apocalyptic scale. So terror bombings of civilian cities, killing millions with high explosive, with incendiary bombs, with poison gas. Uh. This is a horrible thing to imagine, is you know, just right around the corner coming to your city or the city next door. Yeah.

I remember seeing an old holiday cartoon actually that depicted talking animals picking up after the last two soldiers shoot each other in in in in this great war, this next war like this, you know across it's like an apocalyptic trench landscape with two gas masked individuals, so you can it provides just a nice flash of what you're

talking about here. Yeah. So this is obviously causing intense fear and paranoia around the world, and the idea is, okay, what can we do to save us from the new technological horror the bomber the air power force, and so you had things like anti aircraft guns, you had fighter planes. Everybody knew basically, and everybody agreed that these were insufficient. Even good anti air defenses would never stop all the

bombers headed for your city. The best they could do is provide some deterrent and sort of reduced the bombing force. There was a generally correct sense that the bombers would always get through your defenses. And most military authorities realized that there was no total defense against air power, and that the only real defense was the threat of retaliation from the air power of your own. Like the best way to protect your cities from bombing was to just say, well,

if you bomb us, will bomb you. Like, I feel like one of the the only way to perhaps imagine the scenario is to think about the fact that we have that that if a foreign force were to show up in orbit over Earth, we would have no defense against them dropping things upon us. And I mean literally dropping just heavy objects that would do tremendous damage, uh, just just by virtue of their orbital superiority. Yeah, yeah,

I mean that's an analogous scenario. Yeah, it's like, what can you do to I mean, we could sort of shoot at them, but we wouldn't really have much of a defense. Right, Maybe you shoot one of them, right, but can you can you bring it all down? Probably not? And likewise, you're yet you're dealing with with multiple bombers. Uh, you're dealing with with with just growing ever growing air forces from all of these major powers at the time. Exactly.

So if you are a well, whether you're a military commander or a civilian just sitting there and watching this build up of air power. This is like, Okay, you're just watching someone collect the weapons with which to attack the civilians on both sides of whatever war, on all sides of whatever war comes next. And to a large extent, this was a true prophecy because you look at air combat during the Second World War and it features all of these things. It features UH bombers that are able

to reach pretty far around the world. You're you're you're seeing day bombers, night bombers, you're seeing the terror weapons, the V one and the V two of of the Germans, and then of course at the at the end of the war you're seeing UH, the the atomic bomb as well. So it was a true prophecy in many respects. Like the the paranoia was real. Yeah, and so the kind of sci fi technology of air power that had now become a reality made war a brand new kind of hell.

Even in peace time held that um there was just this constant threat that would fill you with fear and you could never be safe from it. So people were yearning for the idea of something that could repel the bombers, something that could stop the bombers from getting through. And this, I think is the void that the death a really comes in to fill. Ironically, you know, we think of the death rays like a horrible you know, it's the

weapon the villain has in the Superman serials or something. Yeah, But actually, more often the death ray was imagined as a sort of savior, a hero weapon, a hero defensive weapon that would be the only thing that you could that you could use to stop the bombers from reaching you. And this was how it was often sold by the scientists who are claiming to be working on them, or

claimed or claiming to have invented them. They would say, I've made a death ray, and it will make war impossible because everyone now will have defenses against bombers and against air power that will prevent them from being attacked in their homes. And this is this is also kind of a prophetic in its own way, right, because this sounds an awful lot like Star Wars. You mean, not the Star Wars the movie, but the strategic defense initiatives, the idea that you could build a a network that

would protect your nation against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. Fanning quotes one newspaper that characterized one of the many hyped claims of invented death ray as the flaming sword from Genesis.

That's so good. But given all of this context, like the fear that has brought on, the quite legitimate fear of of air power, of bombing, of chemical weapons, and and all that, you can suddenly see why the death ray wasn't just a kind of esthetic curiosity having to do with like science fiction, that it was a thing

that people felt they desperately needed. In reality, we've got to have a way to save us from the ravages of enemy air power should the next war break out, or to prevent the next war from breaking out in the first place. I mean to go back to the flaming sword thing. It's positioning it as as divine intervention. Yeah, because the angel with the sword is preventing Adam and Eve from returning to the garden, essentially from from from

spoiling what should remain pure with their their imperfections. Yeah, and the like say the British or French press at the time, the equivalent, I think would have been preventing the return of the Germans in their inevitable war of revenge. And those fears would prove correct. Well, maybe we should take a break and then when we come back we can discuss specific claims from people who said in one way or another, at one time or another that they had made a death ray. Alright, we're back. So we

we've laid the groundwork here. There was a desire for the death rays as this kind of holy technological protection, the flaming sword that would prevent the terror devil of air power from reaching your cities. Right, and and again think back to our episode on X rays. There are all these discoveries that are taking place about various rays, about about these previously undetectable properties of the world that

can be exploited technologically to do amazing things. Yes, so if you could only create this invisible flaming sword out of the holy power of the cutting edge of technology and science to shoot down those enemy bombers and sort of like build a great energy wall around your civilization to keep it safe from all harm, wouldn't you want

to do that? Yeah? And so we see various individuals developing or attempting develop, to develop, or claiming to have developed or or to be developing, uh, some sort of death ray technology. One great example that goes way back before any of these concerns about bombers or whatever. Uh, it goes all the way to the eighteen seventies. Fanning talks about this in his book Where There's This Guy.

I actually looked up some newspaper articles about this guy from from the New Orleans area in the eighteen seventies. And this guy was called Professor James C. Wing Guard. And in the eighteen seventies he started claiming that he could harness something called quote, the Nameless Force, always capitalized the Nameless Force, and it was related to electricity, and it would, for instance, incinerate a boat at a distance. I think somebody should create a bar in New Orleans

called the Nameless Force. That would be pretty great. That would be great. And he was like he was a local celebrity in a way, like lots of people would come out to watch his demonstrations. There was a point where he incinerated a boat on Lake Poncha Train at a distance, supposedly using array that commanded some kind of whatever this Nameless Force was. However, he was discovered to

be a fraud. I think this This was proved conclusive when two people, including one of his assistants were killed in an eighteen seventy nine explosion while his assistant was trying to place a mind secretly to blow up a ship that he was claiming to use his nameless force on. So this is a great story to start with, because we're gonna see this pattern continue, maybe not with the fatal explode, but with this question. Am I looking at Mr Wizard? Or am I looking at a Wizard? You know?

Am I? Am I looking at somebody who is definitely demonstrating a scientific property? Or am I looking at a Charlatan? Am I looking at somebody who is essentially a professional stage magician who is creating the effect of a death

ray without actually demonstrating the science of it. And one of the things we have to keep in mind as we go forward is it's not always completely either or I think we're gonna look at a couple of people today who it seems are are some mix of real scientist, real inventor creating real inventions, and also Hoaxter and Charlatan, like the same person could be both at different times, right, And and I mean to give some of the Charlottan's credit, I guess it certainly does take a certain amount of

skill to to say nothing of nerve to pull these kind of stunts, to make these claims, and then to uh to do what is nest acessary to to create the effect, even if it involves trickery. I mean, what's the difference between a stage magician and like a cult leader and a fraud. It's just like what they call

their show, right. I always think back to the example of the pooping duck, the old automaton, UH, the machine that had the likeness of a duck, and they would demonstrated by a by feeding it food and then it would it would poop. And the idea was that the the the mechanical duck is digesting. It wasn't digesting. As it turns out, food just went one in one end and uh and some duck poop came out the other end. There was no connection between the two. But still it creates.

It involves a certain amount of technological uh skill to create a duck that appears to be pooping like that. Solid trickery is a skill. But anyway, Robert, do you want to tell me about the story of one Giulio Levi. Yes, Ulivia is a wonderful story. Uh, and and Fanning goes into this story in depth. So remember those purported in rays that we discussed in our X ray episode. Yeah, so after the discovery of X rays, people just kept

expecting to discover more kinds of rays. And in rays were these rays that lots of people claimed to have observed, but then we eventually discovered they just didn't exist. Well, get ready for F rays, because uh in, this is what we end up getting. In nineteen thirteen and nineteen fourteen, that's when newspapers began to report on a thirty three year old Italian inventor named Giulio u Levi. So he claimed to have invented a device that could explode gunpowder

at a distance via these invisible F rays he called them. Okay. He claimed that he had like a ten mile range on this technology, but when French General Joseph Geoffrey requested greater range, he went ahead and bumped that up to fifteen miles. Okay. And of course the thing is Geoffrey also wanted to see a demonstration of the technology in action, and what followed would become of the familiar story in

the death ray business of the early twentieth century. A test that seems engineered like a professional magic trick, uh and some international travel to pitch the tech two different nations. I think one thing that will emerge as we discuss a few of these examples is the idea of you should always be suspicious of somebody who wants to show you something, but they can only show it to you

under extremely specific conditions that they set up exactly. And then it's also just crazy to think to look back and like, can you imagine this today? I mean, to a certain extent, I imagine this. This does happen, but where someone's like, yeah, hey, French military, I got this new to military technology. I'm showing it to the Russians next week, and technically Italy has first DIBs on it, but I'll go ahead and give you a demo. It's kind of crazy to imagine, but that's that's how it

went down. So Jeoffrey says Levy, we got to see a uh, A demonstration of this, so you. Levy insists upon using a vessel flying under the British flag to conduct this experiment to this test, rather so that the French can't simply take his technology from him, which I guess I can I can see where he can make

that case. So he ends up acquiring this use of this British private yacht, and then he uses his machine to detonate some submarine minds, ten of them at six yard intervals, and upon request, he also detonates some ammunition and UH and powder stores inside of a fortress. And according to Fanning, he succeeded in both ventures, though as becomes clear with the minds uh you leave, he seems to have supplied the explosives. But how are these results

received by the audience. That's a big question, right because it was a demonstration. Apparently it depends on who you ask. Fanning points out that some accounts said that he made a favorable impressions why I will others say that he did not. And at any rate, when the French began to ask technical questions about what they had seen you leave, he quote gave responses not conforming to well known sigh sientific principles and even seemed not to understand the technological

nature of some of the queries. That's not a good sign. And then he began to contradict himself, and then he started coming up with excuses not to do more demonstrations, particularly when they started bringing up things like, well, why what if the French military provides the explosives, what if we prepare the explosives or what have What have we just conducted this demonstration completely under military supervision? He said no at first. Now eventually he caves. But then are

an interesting thing happens the apparatus keeps breaking down on him. Yeah, not working today. Yeah, and in this I'm reminded of the various con artists we've discussed this on Stuff to blow your mind before, whose power simply don't work in the same room as say James Randy's skepticism. Yeah, this is something you you tend to hear from from like

psychics and stuff like that a lot. When they when they have their powers put under scrutiny or under controlled conditions established by a skeptical person, sometimes they will say the presence of skeptical people or the presence of nonbelievers somehow like makes their powers not work. I mean, I guess there they might even be suggesting like a cause between you know, like the fact that we've got doubters in the room exaps my my special powers away. This

would just be like oop, since a coincidence. It doesn't work this time, but you remember it worked that other time, right. No. One of the crazy things about this case with Ulivias is that I read it and I'm thinking, oh, expose this guy, make make him do this demonstration under you know, a more rigorous supervision, But that they weren't approaching it quiet like they were not approaching him like James Randy looking to expose the con artist. They the military officers

here legitimately wanted this to be real. Oh yeah, they were. They were invested. And so as it became more and more likely that there might be some sort of confidence game and play here, or some sort of con or the deception, it was more disappointment, according to Fanning than anything, because everyone had their hopes of they thought this might be it. So the French deal Uh ends up not going anywhere after three days of the apparatus not working.

By coincidence, he ends up leaving France for good and attempts to sell his tech in England. And according to fanning account, does he reason that the English are more gullible? I don't know this. I mean this is a question that comes back to the central nature of the con artist, assuming and this is again open for discussion to what extent he is a true con artist. But you see this pattern with the con artist, right, they worked the con here and then they go somewhere else to it

to work. And it's easy to say, what is your long term plan? Like, eventually, aren't you going to run out of marks? Aren't you going to eventually, you know, expose yourself. It's a big world, there's a lot of places to go. Yeah, I guess so, I mean it was maybe, you know, in some respects a bigger world at that time. So he goes to England and according of Fanning, accounts of what happened with the British are varied. Uh,

but what what ended up happening? You ended up with the same pattern, right, more dubious experiments, including the fact that the effect required some sort of device be placed on the explosives that I certainly, from from our standpoint, um,

that's suspicious. And it was unclear if the British later even used his supposed f rays and technology and in in one of the attributed experiments involving offshore detonations, but it sounds like the remote detonation of a mind was accomplished at any rate you leave didn't hook the British and eventually returned home to Italy, and there the Italian government they set him up in Florence, and he continued to impress many people with his experiments and continued to

insist on total control over those experiments. And so he also continued to garner criticism during this time because even though there were plenty of people that were saying, I think this is the real deal. I think he's he's onto something, look at these these tremendous demonstrations, others were saying, I don't know. He controls all the experiments, making a lot of excuses, a lot of excuses. I think he might be a car artist. I think he might be Uh.

I think maybe this is all made up. There's some sort of trickery involved here. More excuses are made to avoid tests that he can't control himself and uh. And there there's there's even this situation where a seismologist by the name of Padre Guido Alfani comes and says, hey, look, let's let's just do a simple uh demonstration here. I'll just set up some explosive, some gunpowder, and it's three meters away, use your device to set it off, and

it'll be observed, will be controlled. This is a situation where all Fani wanted to believe. He thought that, uh, that that that believe he was onto something. And he said, let's just let's just get rid of the criticism. Let's just go ahead and prove it. What are you doing, Let's just prove it. There's one great part of the story where it seems like he tried to leverage his potential military contracts into a marriage to a daughter of

a military official. Yeah. Yeah, he ended uh, he ended up eloping with the daughter of Italian Navy Admiral Pietro of Fernari. Oh and the daughter her name was Maria, and he renamed the f Rays after her. They became

the em Rays. Oh, that's right, they become the Rays later. Yes, So around this time as well, the New York Times ran a story that claimed that that they had figured out the trick here, and that was that Levy was detonating sea mines by boring a hole in each mine and then stuffing sodium inside and then placing a small amount of wool stuffing that into the opening. Okay, so we all know what happens when you get like pure sodium wet, it ignites and if that and then that

if that's touching gunpowder, then that's going to explode. Right. So what he's done here, according to this New York Times article, was that he created a simple timer. So he messes with the mine, the explosive, whatever the thing is they're trying to detonate, and you just kind of point your beam at it and fiddle around, right, And there was fiddling. That's an important thing. He had to make adjustments to the beam, fine tuning in order and also in order to find what he's trying to explode.

So he have he has a general time frame in mind about how long it will take for for the salt water to soak through and reach the sodium. Uh. That gives him, you know, that gives him a rough time frame and then you can just fiddle with the controls until the explosion occurs. And sometimes it would take longer for him to find an explosive, this explosive rather than another. So you can imagine him there saying, well, I'm still looking for it. I'm still looking for it,

and then boom, I found it. Now that could be a good explanation, but Fanning doesn't seem satisfied that that that that gets to everything right, that's right. Fanning says that it doesn't explain some of the demos, such as that Fortress demo, which again the French asked him to do. They said, hey, we there's some explosives here, blow it up,

and it apparently worked. Also, some of the torpedoed nations that he he did later on various publications at the time jumped to his defense and he actually managed to keep this act up for seemingly the rest of his life um death. Yeah, which again, if he's if he's more on the con artist's side, if he's more on the Wizard side, then that's that's very frustrating to think

that he got away with it that long. On the other hand, if he's got at least a little bit of Mr Wizard in there, if if he was onto something and just wasn't able to or willing to know fully demonstrate it or develop it, then I don't know. Well, I mean, we always have to consider the possibility that whatever f rays are, I mean, he he may have had some technological apparatus that did something, but it didn't work. Maybe as well as he wanted it to or as

well as he was advertising. So, I mean, there's always the possibility that when somebody's using trickery of this kind that it's a top to bottom total hoax, or maybe that they're just that they're amplifying what they would actually be able to do, or making more consistent results by using tricks and line to people. So perhaps he developed

something that worked, say of the time. But then if you're doing a demonstration and trying to sell it and you're you know, you don't have like a really firm moral compass, maybe you go ahead and rig the explosions

just to ensure that the demo goes well. Yeah, um, you know you don't want this, you know, wanted to be like one of these situations where you're you're unveiling your new operating system and you get the screen of death, right, Yeah, and you know, remote detonation of explosives is not something

that would have been like unthinkable at the time. In fact, the guy were about to talk about also performed similar demonstrations of remote detonation of explosives, and though he later made claims of technology that seemed to not have much basis in fact or contain elements of hoaxing. Uh you know you you could probably remote blow up a mind in the nineteen teens. That seems within cutting edge inventor parameters.

Then absolutely so. Anyway, this I guess this brings us to maybe the star of this episode, a guy named Harry Grindel Matthews. I have to say, every time I read his name, I read it in my mind is Grindel wald Wald? What is that? What is that like? H Is that like a Pokemon guy? No, No, he's a He's an evil wizard in the Harry Potter universe. Okay, yeah, that's right. Yeah, are our our guy here though that

we're talking about. It's probably a little more Gilderoy Lockhart though, So Harry Grendel matt Well, this will come back because Harry Grendel Matthews. He was born in the year eighteen eighty in the village of Winterborne, Gloucestershire, which is in southwest England, and apparently J. K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter books, lived in that same village for part of her childhood. Wow, all right, well, maybe there is a direct grinder grindle Wald reference here strange kawinky dink.

So maybe we'll see if there are any more parallels emerging between the two. Harry's anyway, Harry Grendel Matthews. He was an electrical engine nearby training. He fought in South Africa in the Second Boer War at the turn of the twentieth century. I think he was part of a constabulary unit. And after that he devoted his life to inventing things, claiming to have invented things, and hyping those claimed inventions. So he has a bunch of supposed inventions

credited to him. One of them is a radio telephone, which he claimed could transmit calls wirelessly between ground stations and airplanes. And you can immediately see the military relevance there. Absolutely able to an ability to communicate with your bombers, your your your connaissance planes, et cetera. Yeah, So, in nineteen twelve he was actually invited to Buckingham Palace to demonstrate the invention for Queen Mary. Unfortunately, this appointment did

not go so well. Some engineers present wanted to look inside his device, and he didn't like this, and he got mad and left suspicious. But inconclusive, he could have just he could just been very particular about his technology, right. He also invented a certain thod for producing talking motion pictures, basically a method for playing sound on film. Uh. And Grendel Matthews would later go on to show a sustained interest in working with film and TV. Yeah, if if

I remember correctly the ideas. He used this technology to interview Shackleton, Oh, Ernst Shackleton, Yeah, for the was it Arctic or Antarctic expedition? Antarctic the thing, not Frankenstein. That's a good distinction. Uh. He also supposedly invented a light projector which could display images against the night sky or against a large surface like the side of a building.

We'll come back to that later. And then in December nineteen fifteen, while World War One was going on, Grendel Matthews performed a demonstration at a pond in London in front of an audience of British admirals and other officials. And this demonstration showed off remote control of some war relevant machines, including remote control of a model boat which he could steer around and shoot the gun of, and remote detonation of a mind and strangely, at least to me.

The reports UH from the time indicate the Grendel Matthews controlled his model boat and his explosives not by means of a radio antenna, but by aiming a searchlight at them to control a selenium element. And from all accounts I can find, it seems like this demonstration was actually a success. It it as I can't tell any reason

to think that this technology didn't actually work. Grindall, Matthews was given a cash award of twenty five thousand pounds of payment from the government, and he was promised more if he could develop a remote controlled aerial torpedo, but

he never did that. And there was a lot of overlap at this time between the concepts of like a ray weapon and simply the wireless remote control of machines like I don't know if you noticed this in the reading, but sometimes these ideas seemed to blur together at the time, as if like a remote control car would be this

like something in the same class as ray weapons. I thought, that's kind of odd, but well, the idea of controlling something at a distance and and or uh of sending energy to a machine or to a or to a target, either enough to power some sort of a machine, or to detonate a bunch of gunpowder. Well, if you go and read these articles from the time about death rays, very often they mentioned they're like, okay, we could annihilate an army or shoot or whatever. But then they almost

always mentioned or stop the engines of an airplane. That I mean that that goes right back to the main motivation, like the kind of next war paranoia. That's uh, that's motivating these hopes for a death ray, the idea that they could stop bombers from reaching your cities. There's this overlap between it as a just direct, destructive physical weapon and something that could exert a power or control mechanism

from a distance, especially over engines and motors. Uh. And and it also helps symphasize that despite the name, the death ray is not always expected to just kill though maybe maybe you could consider that as killing an engine or killing a machine. But anyway. Grendel Matthews received his greatest fame by far when in nineteen twenty three and nineteen twenty four he started to announce his creation of a wireless means of of beaming energy at a distance

sufficient to take down aircraft. And this was the birth of the Grendel Matthews death Ray. And I want to be clear again, that's not our retroactive appellation. And that's what he called it, though he later claimed that he found the term inaccurate, but he he authorized calling it that as evidenced by a film that he had made to promote the device. Maybe we should take a break and then we come back to a film review. All right,

we're back. So the Death Ray Harry Harry Grendel Matthew's own promotional film on his death ray, called the Death Ray. We will include a link to to the YouTube upload of this, uh, this very film. It's definitely worth feeling because it is. It is weird and uh and and hilarious. Yeah, it's so. It's directed by again him Gaston kura Bay

who otherwise he was a French director. Otherwise seems to have specialized in short sort of locale documentaries, such as a run round Godstone and through cheddar Gorge, but later he went on to make early science fiction pictures called things like The Fugitive Futurist, which is about a down on his gambler who is approached by an inventor with a machine that can predict the future. I'm I'm intrigued.

It's a good sell. I think he essentially became known for being a director who could do like special effects, you know, that he could do like a trick photography, which in retrospect makes this very suspicious as a film that is supposed to be demonstrating a new technology. Yes, but the Death Ray it builds itself as a nonfiction documentary quote, a picturization of some of the president future

possibilities of a great scientific discovery. The funny thing about the the YouTube riff of it that we were listening to anyway, it has just this delightful uh soundtrack. This is sort of typical old timey silent movie music going on in the background. Yeah, it's the steamboat itchy piano music. The film also it's I don't know, it's not shy about what it claims. Grendel Matthews quotes himself in it. There's this quote, within fifteen years, the machine gun will

only be found in museums. Why because quote the Grendel Matthew's death Ray in the future may control the destiny of the world. Well, so how does the death ray work? You hope the film will show you Instead the film makes you wait. First, it tells you about Grendel Matthew's other inventions and achievements, like the light controlled boat. Yeah, it reminds me a lot of promotional videos in that respect, you know, like really drives home how brilliant this guy is.

With frequent shots, I think it's the same shot because you know it's expensive to show, right, especially at the time. It's a shot of Grendel Matthews at his desk like sort of pretending to write something, pretending to work, and then stopping as if an idea has seized him and he stares off into the middle distance to think about it.

There's another part where yeah, that part is great, And then it goes to Grendel Matthews getting on a plane to come to France to make the film that you're currently watching, and it tells you that's what you're seeing. And I think all movies should have this, Like the next Avejurs movie should start with the producer getting on a plane to go have a meeting to make the movie you're about to see. There's a there's also the course. The key to this is the first scene where they're

actually going to demonstrate this technology. Yes. So they get to his lab HGM and his lab with a bunch of assistants showing the death ray at work. And this scene is wonderful because first you see two men they're sort of you know, messing around with the death ray, get ready to use it, and then two other guys just come strolling into the room in for one of the death threats right now, they're just straight down range

of it. Yeah. No, no, no safety protocols at all, which I guess wouldn't be that unbelievable at the time, but still it's it's kind of hilarious in this film. Well, he did later claim that he had like been injured by his own inventions. He claimed to have lost sight in one eye by doing experiments with the death ray. But as we discussed in our we discussed a similar like real cases of injuries occurring in in X ray

with X ray technology. So it's very believable that he could have I mean, yes, he could have heard himself messing around with technology that he understood or even halfway understood, but he could have also just been inspired by these tales of real scientists um suffering you know, radiation related injuries. So after that there. There are two main demonstrations. They used the ray to remotely illuminate an electric light. Then they used the ray to blow up a pile of

gunpowder at a distance. But how does it work? The most of the movie tells you is quote the general principle of the death ray is that the object is first located by the electrical beam, which forms a path through which the controlled electrical energy is transmitted. Doesn't get

much more specific than that. Um And then they take it outside and they just shows them sort of working it outside, and it flashes a few title cards at you with a little more, you know, some vague language about electricity and how it's said like porcelain housing, and they have this sort of larger scale, sort of anti aircraft looking version of it. Yeah, and then it ends with what it like immediately cuts to like a burning

city or burning building. Yeah, as if as if he has just demonstrated its awful force by taking out saying in an entire factory or something. Yes, it looks as if they're implying that he has demonstrated the use of

the death ray on a city in France. It seems to suggest that it isn't clear Also, I think it's funny that the film it repeats this special phrase both words capitalized luminate or burn, and they're capitalized and italicized, So it looks like this was supposed to become the trademark slogan of the Death Ray, where you know, you'd like see the ad for it in Look magazine and it'll be it''s like eleven herbs and spices or taste the rainbow, illuminate or burn. Well, you know, I guess,

I mean it does. It does get to the fact that any like new technology is going to be able to You're gonna be able to illuminate or burn with it, right, You're gonna be able to uh to hurt and use it as an instrument of war or do something beneficial. Right, Yeah, that's true. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's death Ray.

I guess this is kind of a tangent. But the film here makes me think in an even broader way about terrifying, unfamiliar technologies of war in the nineteen twenties and thirties, not just the apocalyptic new technological threat of aerial bombing, but of information warfare. Because a film like this could easily be used as a form of high tech propaganda at the time. Yeah, it reeks of propaganda.

It's just personal propaganda, Yes, like at a time when people I mean, I don't know honestly how wary and how savvy people were about what they were watching in films at the time, But I wonder if this was at a time when people were not used to films and we're not used to special effects, and we're not used to being skeptical about the potentially misleading powers of editing.

Like if that is the case, if people were less skeptical about that kind of thing back, then would an audience necessarily understand that a film was tricking them if it just showed them a thing looking like a ray gun and then immediately cut to footage of a city on fire, or would you be more sort of naturally gullibly just lad to believe that that must be what the ray gun did? I would I would love to explore this particular topic in more detail when we we

can come back and discuss the invention of the motion picture. Yes, because I think about this a lot watching films with with my son who who's six and and certainly at an age where he you know, he understands the complexity of things that a lot more. But at the same time, there's so much about filmmaking he doesn't know. There's a way, there's something, there's a way of watching a film as a child that you just can't do when you're older, when you know how movies are made, you know, the

gage is wide open. Just you just accept it. Like he he can watch a film with the level of immersion that is so very rare that for me as an adult, like I have to just be totally blown away or sucked in by a film to lose myself and forget that I'm watching a film. But for him, it's more, it's more like the default. Um And and certainly you hear stories about people watching films during the

silent film area. Some of these early films, say footage of a train barreling towards the camera and being freaked out by it, or an outlaw appointing his gun at the camera. Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so I would say it's possible that the same way our cities were unprepared for air bombers and mustard gas, are the people of the time we're maybe unprepared for the psychological warfare potential of the cinema, of film editing and special effects trickery. And of course we don't need to

just speculate about this. I mean, at least in one way, we know the war motivating power of of film as a as a propaganda delivery system. I think about the use of cinema in Germany as a weapon to seed and cultivate the prejudices of the people, like spreading anti Semitism, spreading other forms of racism, promoting this sense of authoritarian patriotism. And you can easily see how like the emerging art and technology of film could be a powerful weapon also

of deterrence against a potential enemy. If you're showing your enemies of film that that is supposedly showing off some weapon you have, but using movie magic to create the illusion that your military to technology is unstoppable, uh, and that it might be useless to fight against you. In fact, you know what this reminds me of mentioning psychic research again, like the idea of that that Russian uh, that Russian video from I guess it was the sixties or the seventies.

I don't quite recall of the girl who could like stop a frog's heart with her mind supposedly, And the question is, so, you know, Russian State TV at the time produced this video, and the question is were they producing of a video that they thought was of a real psychic power that they could use for warfare or was it an intentional hoax designed to trick the Russian

people into thinking their government had this power? Or was it a hoax designed to trick their their enemies abroad into thinking they had this power and thus to you know, become scared and waste resources, uh, studying psychic research on their own. Well, we've seen even today though, that if another nation produces a video or has some sort of a press conference about some new military technology that they have or claim to have, it's gonna make headlines in

rival nations. We've seen that with North Korean um uh you know bad c g I of missiles taking out North America. We've seen that with releases from the Russian government of the various new weapons systems that have have been at least claimed to have been developed. So, yeah, the film is a powerful thing. Propaganda is a powerful thing. But let's get back to grindel Wald or grind Matthews. Right. So, beginning in nineteen twenty four, Grinda Wald met Grinda Wald

Grendel Matthews. He was all over the place. He was hyping this death ray and sometimes performing demonstrations in which this death ray would be used to do things like stop a motorcycle engine at a distance of several yards, or turn on an electric lamp at a distance, or supposedly sometimes even kill a living target such as a mouse. And in a lot of ways, the press ate it up.

You know, newspapers and magazines all around the world published these articles on Grindel math Use and his startling discovery of the death ray. That would, you know, make war impossible, often in the context of this savior technology, right, it would prevent the next war. And HGM attracted the attention of potential private investors. He attracted the attention of governments. Unfortunately, I think there are a lot of notes of the

Allevie syndrome here. There are repeated mixed reports about the success of his demonstrations. Grendel Matthews would sometimes refuse to or not sometimes pretty much always refuse to divulge technical specifics about how his death ray worked, and he would refuse to perform additional demonstrations under new conditions. So you know that makes you wonder there's no try it before

you buy it, right. Uh So here's my take. I think it's certain that Grendel Matthew's Death Ray couldn't do all of the amazing things he was claiming, like shooting airplanes out of the sky or burning cities. But it's not clear to me whether the Death through A was a complete and total hoax top to bottom, or whether it did something just far less impressive than had been promised.

And one does have to wonner. You're getting back to that idea that it's not necessarily just Wizard or Mr Wizard is not necessarily scientist or con artists, but they're being room for this middle area. And I keep thinking, as we've been recording this, I keep thinking about the fact that there is a world war going on in the background of all this, and or the aftermath of the of a world war. Yeah, this would have been the aftermath, but yeah, but that's what every everybody had

in mind. So you have this tremendously traumatic experience that everyone has has has survived or barely survived, that is informing this and you have to uh, it's like it's easy to put yourselves in his shoes. So I can't help but wonder to what extent that trauma affects him as well, if if that's playing into his decision or at least his the series of decisions that lead to this has this space between um uh, scientific endeavor and just a pure con job. Another way you can think

about it is imagine. The way is that, you know, people writing grant proposals for research projects very very often over hype what they're what they're gonna discover, right right. This is you know, they're not necessarily lying, they're just offering a best case scenario for what their discovery could yield.

You know, like somebody working on studying I don't know, the movements of snakes and water might say this could potentially, you know, lead to the creation of new robots that could save lives, and you know what, I yeah, it's my favorite part of coming back to Eureka. It's one of my favorite part of any Eureka Alert press release is that you're gonna get down to that part where they say they just speculate loosely on what this might do in the future, right, And so it's not it's

not that they're lying, but they are. They are trying to like offer some enticing charity to people with money who might be able to fund their research, which the people doing the research think is valuable for maybe all kinds of reasons, or the science writer who picks up on it, and maybe they're bored with the release until you mentioned, hey, it could when they lead to uh, talking robots or you know, curing the sick, Yeah, x, y or z. And in many cases maybe it could

actually lead to something like that. But it's a you know, it's a small incremental step, and you've got to you've got to remind people of what the potential big picture is. You wonder if some people at the time were actually not creating death rays that could make war obsolete. They were actually creating something very modest, but they were thinking, Okay,

this is a step in the right direction. And in order to get the funding, I need to keep working on this, or to get it in the hands of people who could look at it and understand what's going on, I need to overhype it a little bit. Well, not only that, like I need to overhype it to help save the world. To come back to that idea that this would be the burning sword that would save the world from the next great war that would surely do

us all in. Yeah. Now, but then again, I want to be clear, I'm not saying I think we know that this is the case about Ulivi or Grendall, Matthews or any of these guys. I mean, they might have been just like complete thieves and we don't know. But but if there really was anything to it, it seems like the most likely explanation, according to skeptical experts at the time, was that the ray created some kind of beam path through the air that would be a conductor

for electricity. And so one explanation along these lines was speaking to The New York Times. I think this was in ninety four a doctor Alfred In Goldsmith, an electrical engineering professor at the College of the City of New York and the chief radio broadcasting engineer of the Radio

Corporation of America. He hypothesized that the death ray worked by shooting a beam of ultra violet light, which was known at the time to ionize the air, and then in turn that would create a tunnel of ionized air that would serve as a kind of wire for conducting electricity to the target, and this would this would essentially

create a kind of artificial lightning. Now this take might be too generous, but it's interesting, like in the modern world, there are actually devices that have been advertised as working kind of like this. One example would be there were reports in twelve of a US military research project called the Laser induced Plasma Channel or l I p C, which, instead of a beam of ultra violet light us as

a laser. But it's the same principle. You send a laser pulse directed through the air and that creates a channel of ionized air molecules, meaning the air molecules are stripped of their electrons so they become a plasma. And this plasma conducts electricity very well, while the intact air particles all around it do not conduct electricity well and

they form an insulator. So you've got this tunnel of ionized gas created by the laser that can supposedly be used to conduct a bolt of electricity like lightning to a target, say a bunch of explosive ordinance. But the fact that this kind of research is purported it to exist today should not make us conclude that Grendel Matthews

could or did actually achieve something similar. And his flakiness and secretiveness about the device, especially coupled with that horrible movie, it all makes me suspicious, right, But of course we're not the only ones who are suspicious. We're not the only ones who were suspicious. No, there was a ton of skeptical Grindel Matthews backlash at the time, with publications like Scientific American basically mocking him and dismantling his claims, saying,

you know, what he was claiming was impossible. But then there were also a lot of people who championed the supposed invention. He got a ton of press coverage. Uh, and his claims did not just find a sympathetic year with the press and much of the public. Some actual leaders to really took notice. Robert, can you do a Winston Churchill voice? I was actually listening to Winston Churchill earlier this morning, so maybe I can. Let's see so.

In a April nine letter to one of his science advisors, quoted in Fanning's book, Winston Churchill wrote the follow wing, I wish you would make inquiries about the man who is said to have discovered a ray which will kill at a certain distance. I meet people who say that it can actually be seen to kill mice, etcetera. It may all be a hoax, but my experience has been not to take no for an answer. You know, I don't actually know what Winston Churchill's voice sounds like at

the moment. I mean i've heard him before, I can't remember it. So whatever that was, that was great. There's a track by this uh, this artist I love recorded under the name wax Factor. Uh, and now I think he uses the moniker Pete Sasquatch right now. But he had this great track um that utilizes the sample from Winston Churchill talking about uh, just you know about how how nothing can stop the Allied response. Uh, it's it's it's wonderful. Was it that we will fight them on

the beaches speech? Um? I'm not sure if it's from that that that clip that is not utilized in the song, but uh, it is from it might be from that same speech I'm a shake gown which speech it's actually from? Well, anyway, Churchill he wanted to get in on the death ray. He's like, if there's death ray to be had, England must have it. And certainly he's this guy he's talking about, he's talking about a guy who's continuing to show up

in the news. Yeah, you know, so it's it's it's kind of like the situation with the leaving, like so somebody is going to say, hey, well, let's find out, just prove it. Just find out this guy that nobody everybody, they won't shut up about this this beam uh technology that he has. Let's get to the bottom of it.

And apparently HTMs research was at least once brought up for debate in the British Parliament, with members of the House of Commons asking the Undersecretary for Air about updates on the status of the government's potential relationship with Grendel Matthews and his ray and uh, funny enough, whether or not anybody actually had anything like a working death ray at the time, all the major governments started piping up, like in the British and the French governments were like, uh,

we've already got a death rom and the German offici all told the Chicago Tribune in that year that Germany already had a battery of rays that would quote spread a curtain of death like the gas clouds of the recent war, such a cheery time. Yeah. And then soon after Russia also said, oh, they were like, we've got a death ray to One story in an Australian newspaper featured claims of a Russian ray weapon that could be

used to melt lead or light cigarettes. That's it just all depends on where you just a nob to, right, I guess so. But yeah, anyway, so the story of Grendel Matthews is interesting because we ultimately don't know, I mean, clearly he was promising things that he could not deliver. Uh, Like we said, we don't know if it's all hoax or just mostly hoax or partially hoax or what. But obviously his his weapons were never put into use. They never became real, real death rays used by any of

these the Allied forces. But he stayed in the press for you know, he kept showing up in articles by sympathetic journalists and stuff for years and years, and even by the time he became clear that nothing was going to really come with the death ray, he was still showing up. He was still inventing things or or you know, trying to find some spin on the technology. At least get his name out there. I was reading a two thousand nine Telegraph article titled Neglected Edwardian inventor made Death

Ray and Uh. They pointed out that Warner Brothers employed him briefly in America to develop his talking picture process. This is the one he used to film. Uh. Uh. Ernest Shackleton a worth noting and stressing that he was not the only or the first inventor to pull off this effect. I think at some point he may have claimed he was the first. Yes, I think. I think it's claimed in that video. Actually, among other things. We didn't even get into all the claims that are made

in that that short film in the Death Ray. Yeah, the Death Ray not really a video but short film. Yes. Um. So he comes back from America from working for Warner Brothers and in the nineteen thirties he he starts, uh, promoting the sky projector invention that you touched on earlier. Uh. And he even successfully cast the words Happy Christmas and a clock face into the clouds over Hampstead, England. Uh. This is from the Telegraph article, but it's by Steven Adams.

He says, quote, while in America, he used film lighting equipment to create a high powered light projector thought by some to be the inspiration for the bat signal in the Batman cartoons. Yeah, so did Bob Kine say that or whoever? I don't know if I thought by some, I'm not sure, but I mean that the time frame would more or less workout. I guess. So he's projecting things into the sky and then we kind of get Batman.

It's curious how all these these are connections. This is exactly what James Burke was talking about, you know, Robert, I think we're gonna have to call it there for the day. But the death ray has become such a richer and more interesting subject than I would have even imagined. I think we got a whole other episode worth of interesting death ray history and thoughts in us. Yeah, we didn't even get into Tesla. We're gonna have to save that for the next episode. Please join us again next

time for more death ray goodness. In the meantime, if you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. You can also just find Invention anywhere you get your podcast, the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast, you name it. We're there, subscribe, give us a rating, throw some stars at us say some nice things about it as a great way to support the show. Huge thanks as always to our excellent

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