The Death Ray, Part 2

us up into the modern era. This episode is going to be really more about the legacy of the death ray. Uh. You know, usually what amounts for the second half of a normal episode of Invention, the post Harry Grindel Matthews period, the post Grindel walled period, as you might put it. Uh. So, I guess we should do a real brief refresher on

what we talked about last time. So we talked about how during the first half of the twentieth century, especially in the nineteen twenties and thirties, there were all these news were ports about a new technology on the cusp

of realization, and it was the death ray. This was some kind of directed energy weapon, most often characterized as harnessing the power of electricity, but sometimes also described as working on the basis of invisible particle beams, heat rays, radio or radio waves, radium rays, X rays, or other hypothetical exotic powers, such as the nameless force of the con artist James C. Wingarde remember him, or the so called f rays of Giulio U Levi which were later

I think renamed M rays and who knows what after that. Yeah, And that one especially was this mix of you know, possibly you know, some sort of technological um trickery that was taking place, some sort of seems like there may have been some sort of wave effect that he was utilizing. But on the other hand, there was definitely some trickery. Uh, definitely some some underhanded salesmanship when it came to marketing

this wonder weapon to different nation states. Leivie probably would have made a good stage magician, Yes, And I think that, And that's one of the comparisons we kept making, like does this sound more like a demonstration of a weapon technology,

more more like a David Copperfield stunt. Well, Levi's career started this pattern that we would see just again and again and again throughout the history of these death ray inventors, which is, they come out with a claim, they say, I've got a death ray does amazing things, and then they either will not demonstrate their technology publicly and then it just kind of goes away, or they do demonstrations, but they tightly control the conditions of those demonstrations and

have to like kind of be around to set things up ahead of time, which makes you wonder if there's tricker going on. Uh. So, of course we also talked about the myths last time, like the myth of bal Or Baylor. How do you say that Balor I believe, Yeah,

the wonderful death gaze underneath his giant lid. Uh. And then we talked about why these claims of the thray invention were so popular, especially in this one historical period of like the nineteen twenties and thirties, And so we cited this 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. From which I think correctly makes the connection

between the fascination with death rays and the paranoia people felt after World War One that the new technology of aerial bombing and chemical weapons would mean that the next war between the great powers, often referred to in the newspapers, just as the next war, would be apocalyptic in the scale of its death toll, unless we could find some way to stop the bomber planes before they reach their targets in in the civilian areas, or or if they

could just stop war altogether. And of course, the idea of the death ray filled this gap of defensive technology in people's minds, because without without imagining a death ray, people would just be forced to contemplate the fact that

the bombers could always reach them. And then, finally, we also discussed the story of Harry Grendel Matthews, and English electrical engineer who set off this media firestorm in the year nineteen twenty four with a well publicized campaign of claims that he had invented a death ray which could stop airplane motors at a distance or kill armies with

a beam of electricity. And we talked about the short film that he had made to promote this invention, though ultimately Grendel Matthews was never able to demonstrate that his Invention did what he claimed, at least not in a reliable or reproducible way. And if you want to watch that short film, I have a link to it on the landing page for this and the previous episode of Invention at our website invention pod dot com. I recommend it. It's it's like Buster Keaton aside. It's one of the

funniest silent movies I've seen. Yes, it is unintentionally hilarious. Uh So. Harry Grendel Matthews, though, was far from the only guy running the death Ray racket. We've discussed a few of the people who came before him are around the same time with related claims. Many many people came after him. It seems like Grendall Matthews really just got the death ray racket. He inspired an army of followers. Yeah, if if he were doing it today, he would have

a pretty entertaining Kickstarter page, I think. But this was this was how you kicked off your projects back then. You were just kind of like the idea of the lone inventor in his lab going out and selling his wares with the vaudevillian style. I'm looking for investors, so I'm going to France, I'm going to England, going to the United States. Who's gonna get Who's going to get the death ray? Yeah, and and again it's just kind of crazy to to look at these examples where they're

just going around. They're talking to uh, you know, to Italy, to France, to the to to to England, then going over to Russia peddling their super weapon, you know, and what today would seem insane. It would be like James Bond villain level of of danger here, And a lot of these newspaper reports do have a very James Bond

villain kind of feel to them. In fact, one of the points Fanning made that we talked about last time was how a lot of these death ray stories, you often would assume that the obsession with them in the public came from science fiction, but actually he says, it's sort of the other way around, Like a lot of the fictional death rays and fictional mad scientists were very similar to stuff you could read about in all kinds

in newspaper articles all the time in the twenties and thirties. Yeah. Yeah, So this was a case where the science fiction was born out of the out of the science. Yeah. Or the supposed science the the what was classed as nonfiction reports about science, but a lot of it turned out to be tricker what seemed to be the technological trajectory.

And in the same way that you know, everyone always brings up flying cars, of course, and we have all these wonderful examples of flying car like vehicles in our science fiction and it was based in a large large part on the idea that this seemed to be the trajectory, like this seems to be where we're going, so we're

populating our visions of the future with this idea. I think actually the death ray in the flying car will have some very interesting parallels because in both cases these are examples of things which are not in any way prohibited by the laws of physics, Like you can make these things, it's just a question of whether they are in fact practical when you could accomplish the same goals

roughly with much much cheaper and more efficient stuff. And by the way, we will be discussing some of our favorite science fiction death rays later on in the podcast,

more towards the end. Yes, so Fanning refers to this period between Grindall, Matthew's Big media splash around nineteen twenty four and the outbreak of the Second World War, so basically nineteen to nineteen thirty nine as the death ray craze, and he points out that during this period, claims of death ray inventions were constantly appearing in the media, often from frauds and con men, but also from like real scientists who apparently just had enthusiasm for what they might

be able to do. Well. Talk about some of those real, very credible scientists later on who uh thought, who you know, thought that they could make a death ray, but also from this class of sort of enthusiastic amateur inventors who seem to be true believers in their own work, but

without much of an understanding of the underlying physics. This is something we'll have to keep in mind when eventually we come back around and discuss uh attempts at zero gravity technology, because you see a very similar thing, amateurs coming along and creating something that may appear to be zero gravity but is not. I want to talk about one particular example of the many many can we call him ray gu entrepreneurs like that? Yeah, the ray entrepreneurs

who appeared in this post. Grendel Matthews period. I want to look at a fellow named Maurice Francill. Now Fanning cites this guy in his book, but I actually looked up an original newspaper article from October ninety. I think it's a wire service article, but this version was in the Danville Morning News and it was basically too good not to read in full. I think, because this is this is a local story for us, right right. This guy he gave he showed up at an expo in Atlanta,

So maybe we can. Robert, you want to trade off reading parts of this article here, certainly I'll start here, dateline Atlanta. Will the radio death ray make future war impossible? Maurice Francill, American radio wizard, thinks it will. However, should there ever be another conflict between nations, france Hill predicts that the weapons used will be poison gas and light

radio death dealing waves, annihilating hundreds at a time. Francil, who admits he stumbled on the death ray by accident, told the recent radio exposition here that he plans to ask the governor of some state for the privilege of demonstrating its death dealing properties on some condemned murderer. The day is not far distant, said Francil, when death ray and radio waves will be used by police to stop

engines of speeders and bandits. The death ray is only slightly different from the radio wave, but it is too deadly for radio amateurs to be permitted to experiment with. Just think what it would have meant to the police of Elizabeth, New Jersey when they were pursuing the mall robberts. Bullets could not stop the fleeing bandits, but radio waves

properly applied would have halted them. The same force, applied in a slightly different manner, can be employed to start fires at a distance, and such action necessarily would explode powder. Its use can be carried even further so as to supersede explosives in times of war. The deadly effects of violets in certain forms, X rays and similar waves are well known. I have the wave that is deadly, but it is too dangerous for radio amateurs to know. So

I love already. By ninety we're seeing some creep of the concept. Right like it starts always with this high minded like we're gonna end war. We will make war impossible. It's time for world peace. The death ray will do it. And the hook here is still that it will make war impossible or at least stop the bombers that are

coming to kill civilians by the millions. But Maurice here apparently just can't help himself and almost immediately starts drooling about incinerating criminals and begging governors to give him a prisoner to vaporize, and also going on about how the ray is mine, It's all mine, no one else can

have it. You know, this brings me back to the Guillotine episode, you know, where we talked about the how inevitably a new technology comes along, somebody is going to say, let's execute people with this, yes, and and here we have the exact same situation, granted with the technology that has not actually come to fruition, but already they're thinking we could execute prisoners with this. Well, this is another version of what happened with the electric chair. You know.

The electric chair was that conclusion brought to fruition in the wired electricity era, and now they're essentially trying to do the same thing for the wireless energy era, and thank goodness it didn't catch on. I the idea of say, essentially microwaving are our prisoners is a little unsettling. I don't think that, Like if you go back and you play the type of history again, I don't think it's

impossible that something like that would have happened. I mean, people are always interested in trying new technology, like you're saying, to to get retributive justice against against people who they believe have done wrong, like so many people have this bizarre science fiction uh corporal punishment lust. And granted, I could also see where someone could have made the argument like, well, the death ray, that's the best way, the most humane

way to execute somebody. That's exactly what they would have said. Yeah, it will be quick and painless, you know, far better than those older technologies. I guess we can be glad that didn't happen. No, like Georgia governor said go for it. As far as I know, no governor ever gave him a prisoner to demonstrate on uh so. A couple of other ones mentioned in fanning that I just couldn't pass

up mentioning because they're pretty weird. One is in nineteen six and English musseur and osteopath named Ibbotson said he had invented a ray that could go through six ft of lead, work as an electrical gun shooting seven inch bullets, work as a remote control for a boat, turns steel to powder, weld brass and steel together, and petrify silk. M what does that mean? I don't know. I know you can't iron silk. Really, that is my understanding. Yes, that if you iron it, you destroy it. Okay, learn

something new every day. Uh. Oh, here's another good one that Fanning mentions, the plague ray. Oh. This this is a great title because this sounds like it's legitimately a technology from like the Warhammer forty k universe that like plague marines would be using to to uh you know, to to to zap enemy marines with some sort of awful infection. It sounds to me like a lesser legoty movie.

But so. In nineteen thirty three, a professor oh A Newell, head of research at the National League of Health in London, said he had a wireless ray that could transmit diseases such as anthrax. I have a hard time imagining how that could possibly work. Uh, something seems missing there. But this is just a tiny, tiny taste. There are just so many guys with death rays. Fanning documents them exhaustively.

I don't know how how to count how many of these stories appeared in different UH newspapers throughout the twenties and thirties, but it's at least dozens, maybe over a hundred that he documents here, And it's just they're they're very, very common, repeating themes, like very often the inventor says the death ray will end all war or make war impossible, claims it can stop airplanes or and kill or disable

humans at a distance. I think this is consistent with everything we've been talking about so far, because there's all this fear of the next war, and the main part of that fear being the terror of aerial bombing. But there's other common weirdness that keeps showing up, Like there were at least a handful of stories that all contained the detail that the inventor promised a death ray and then claimed they had been burglarized and the plans had

been stolen. How convenient. Yes, And it liigns up with what we saw with an examples in the last episode, where as as an interested party begins asking more questions and asking for more control over experiments and and um and demonstrations. Suddenly the technology is not working as well, Suddenly there are problems. So this seems like the next logical step, like oops, it was stolen. Sorry, yeah, exactly.

And I think this highlights that tons of people making these kind of claims were either either totally in over their heads and they made a claim and then couldn't back it up, or they were just frauds from the beginning. But there were actual, real scientists and real inventors who were at least claiming to be involved in this kind of research, and there were some government projects that looked

into it throughout this period. And I think maybe we should explore one of these big name scientists who got into the death ray business. When we come back from a break. All right, we're back, so everybody's probably wonder who's it going to be. Well, it's Nicola Tesla, of course it's Tesla. So Nicola Tesla, the you know, the famous, the famous engineer, scientists, inventor, arch enemy of Edison. This is this is one of the biggest names in legitimate

scientific and technological innovation of the electricity era. I mean, this guy, this guy is the real deal. He's not a con artist, right, And really he's a guy that has become I feel like his star has only risen over the past ten fifteen years as people have learned more about him, and he's just become kind of an online cult figure. Yeah, totally. I think there were several memes or comic strips about him at some point that didn't really popular. Even a video game where he battles

HP Lovecraft. Now I didn't know that, and Lovecraft is the villain. I did not know that, but I would play that game. It looks fun. It looks fun. So at various times throughout the nineteen thirties and maybe beforehand, but definitely in the thirties, Tesla claimed to have created some kind of ray or beam or electrical weapon that would destroy war itself. And I've read about this and it seems like he was vaguely describing somewhat different types

of weapons at different times. But just to give you a flavor of the Tesla death ray hype. In an article in The New York Times from July eleventh, nineteen thirty four, the author writes, quote, this death beam, Dr. Tesla said will operate silently but effectively at distances as far as a telescope could see an object on the ground, and as far as the curvature of the earth would permit it, it will be invisible, and we'll leave no

marks behind it beyond its evidence of destruction. An army of one million dead annihilated in an instant, he said, would not reveal even under the most powerful microscope, just what catastrophe had caused its destruction. It's quite a claim. Another connection to last time, it's worth noting that Grendall Matthews publicly expressed great admiration for Tesla and said that

he aspired to be like him. He told his biographer that quote, whenever I had little success, which might have turned my head, I always thought of Tesla and realized that I was a mere student sitting at the feet of a great master. And and Grendelle Matthews was not a not shy about his own ability, So it's probably telling that he felt compelled to bow to Tesla on this. Yeah, and so there were several Tesla claims throughout the years. One is this kind of like beam or ray weapon

that would annihilate armies. Other times Tesla seemed more trying to emphasize that this was purely a defensive weapon that could be used against like enemy aircraft, and he sometimes later described it as being more like an invisible curtain that could surround a country and keep invading armies and aircraft away. Uh. Sometimes it seemed like he was talking about some kind of like charged dust that would go up like a wall in the air and keep stuff out.

His His claims varied a lot over time, and this suggests to me that Tesla did not, like, really have a phototype of anything he was talking about. It sounds more like he he had some ideas and was was talking up his ideas. He seems to have seen some some scientific avenues through which one might develop certain weapons. To give you another taste of what Tesla was cooking up here, here's what he said on the matter in a ninety seven interview with George Sylvester Viract for the

publication Liberty. Quote. Hitherto, all devices that could be used for defense could also be utilized to serve for aggression. This nullified the value of improvement for purposes of peace. But I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea and to perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense. If it is adopted, it will revolutionize the relations between nations. It will make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes,

and other means of attack. My invention requires a large plant, but once it is established, it will be possible to destroy anything men or machines approach within a radius of two hundred miles. It will, so to speak, provide a wall of power, offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression. If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be no purpose in war. My discovery ends the menace of airplanes or submarines, but it ensures the supremacy of the battleship.

Because battleships may be provided with some of the required equipment. There might still be war at sea, but no warships could successfully attack the shoreline, as the coast equipment will be superior to the armament of any battleship. I want to state explicitly that this invention of mine does not contemplate the use of any so called death rays. Rays are not applicable because they cannot be produced in requisite

quantities and diminish rapidly in intensity with distance. All the energy of New York City approximately two million horsepower transformed into rays and projected twenty miles could not kill a human being, because, according to a well known law of physics, it would disperse to such an extent as to be ineffectual. I think he's talking about the inverse square law there,

which is true. My apparatus projects particles that may be relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey to to a small area at a great distance trillions of times more energy than is possible with rays of any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing

can resist. This wonderful feature will make it possible, among other things, to achieve undreamed of results in television, for there will be almost no limit to the intensity of illumination, the size of the picture, or distance of projection. I do not say that there may not be several destructive

wars before the world accepts my gift. I may not live to see its acceptance, but I am convinced that a century from now, every nation will render itself immune from attack by my device, or by a device based

upon a similar principle. So yeah, especially at the end there, despite the fact of despite how confident he is, it seems like he's still basically just hashing this out as sort of a technological thought experiment, right, And he's kind of hedging his bat there by saying, no, I may not live to see it, but this will one day be really big and it's Tesla. I mean, Tesla was a was a real inventor, a real superstar, and so people took his claim seriously, right, I mean not not

everybody did, but this one. He didn't come off as an obvious fraud or con artist here. No, No, he seemed to be a very informed scientist who truly saw farther than than most of us. Yeah, and governments took him seriously too. Yeah. So he announced this idea during a press conference and attempted to gather funding for the project, but he was ultimately unable to convince backers, I guess because he didn't have a properly you know, vaudevillian demonstration

or a short film prepared. However, in ninety seven, the alleged Russian arms front arm toward a trading corporation did right Tesla at check for two and um, and one stage of the technology was allegedly tested, but of course the death ray did not become a standard weapon of war. Uh. And of course war in all its appalling forms certainly continued. And of course we touched on this in the quote

that we just read. But you know, he proposed the technology could be used to transmit wireless power, and it could be used to get this heat up parts of the upper atmosphere to light the sky at night. Oh, that sounds good. That yeah, that doesn't does not sound particularly safe. It seems like that could have some some effects on the local weather. Well, I mean, it's like a lot of Tesla's ideas. I mean he he was,

I think undeniably a genius. But like his idea he had ideas for how to power lights in the home by like, uh, sending out electrical current that would electrify the walls inside a house, and this would induce current in a disconnected light fixture that was between the walls. It's not hard to see why this kind of thing didn't catch on, right, Like you, maybe it's the kind of thing that made sense in Tesla's mind, but the rest of us are probably not going to be on

board with it. Kind of that classic Uni I think we've discussed this before, the the disconnect that that sometimes existed between NASA researchers and astronauts. Mary Roach goes into this in her book Packing for Mars. But you would have these, you know, very hardcore scientist um types who would say, look, all right, we're trying to figure out how you would do this mission to another planet. Well, uh, you know what if we made the walls out of

edible material, what do we we come up? What came up with a way for the astronauts to reconsume fecal matter or something like that, and it would make sense to them, But if you brought it up to the more sort of test pilot um style astronauts of the day, they would say, yeah, we're not doing that. Or like early on they didn't think to plan for the idea that an astronaut might need to pee while in space.

Yeah yeah, So like sometimes, as you can, you can miss the obvious things in trying to solve the bigger problems involved, right totally. I mean, being a genius in one sense doesn't necessarily guarantee that you that you have a thorough and practical mind in in every sense. I mean, we need to remind ourselves that a lot of great inventions don't always come from like scientific geniuses. Sometimes they just come from people who have hands on experience with

a certain kind of work or technology. Yeah, where they say, hey, this thing is pretty cool. But if I turn this around, uh, if I replace this part with this part, then then I have a true invention. Yeah. Now, Tesla wasn't the only real, credible and even famous inventor to claim work

on a death ray. In the nineteen thirties, the Italian inventor googli Elmo Marconi, who is known for his important work on long distance radio transmission and the invention of the wireless telegraph, claimed to be working on a war ray based on ultra short radio waves so I think

basically means microwaves. So Marconi had previously also given public comments about how he thought technology in general, not necessarily weapons, could bring it into all wars, Like in nineteen twelve, he told a magazine that quote, the coming of the wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make war ridiculous. I think he was thinking, like wireless communications

that enables rapid communication all over the place. Maybe, you know, maybe if everybody in the world can just talk to each other, we will stop having all this this fighting. Right. Oh, how naive. But it's also not clear that that's exactly what he meant, because I think he just generally had lots of enthusiasm for the wireless world as a whole. And this is a common thing at the time, especially

among people who are enthusiastic about technology. There's an idea that a new technology will not just fix a particular problem or make a particular job easier, but that it will it will have a kind of utopian effect, will have a civilizing effect upon people, and will will generally bring out a better world. Yeah, and we've seen that

with the Internet, for example. Oh man, do you remember the early Internet hype about how like, wow, if we can just get everybody talking to each other, things will be so great. Yeah. Yeah, And then yeah, let's just get everybody engaged in this conversation. And then you realize what happens when everyone is engaged in the conversation, and it's not just a select bubble of individuals. But it wasn't just Tesla, wasn't just Marconi, It wasn't just all

of these con artists. We've talked about. I mean, there were there were tons of people in this period who hoped for a technology who would they would end all war or make war impossible. And I've been interested in this line of thinking for a while. I remember, long time ago, I did a guest episode of the podcast tech Stuff with our coworker Jonathan Strickland about the idea of people who thought different technologies would bring it into

all war. Like I believe it was Bertilow, the French chemist, who thought, you know, well, once we can use chemistry to engineer abundance of resources around the world and engineer you know, abundant food and things like that out of out of base chemicals, then there will be no more war because there's just nothing to fight over. That's just

one example. I mean, people constantly think that some new invention or technology is going to make all the fighting stop, and it's never happened so far, right, I mean you still I mean, you certainly saw this argument early on with atomic weapons, and you still see it, uh rear its head today where people making the argument that that the atomic arsenals make nations safer and make with the world safer because everyone's afraid to use them this sort

of thing. Yeah, I mean it's hard to it's hard to know how much validity there is to a certain version of this because you can't, like, you know, run

the counterfactual history. But yeah, some people would say, like, nuclear weapons, though they are terrible, if they were ever used, actually have had a positive effect, because they might say, well, look, the United States and the Soviet Union never directly went to war with one another, and if there had, if there hadn't been these nuclear arsenals, they would have directly gone to war with each other. It's if they've ever been used, you're you're talking about active warfare between two

armed opponents. Because of course we we did see the use of nuclear weapons that the close of the Second World War exactly right now, I'm talking about the United States and the Soviet Union against each other. Yeah, um, And and of course we can't know if that's true. I mean, they might without these weapons, they might not have gone to war with each other, but it's certainly

did not stop war bringing into war. I mean, all throughout the Cold War, even though the US and the Soviet Union were never directly in conflict with each other, there were tons of wars that these powers backed and armed and carried out against other nations around the world. I mean, it's the list is huge. Yeah. You know, this idea though, of the of atomic weapons being this kind of having this balancing effect. You you see that

utilized in Frank Herbert's Dune. Uh, there's this whole layer to it where the different great houses, like the Tradees and the Harconans, they all have their own house atomic right, the family Jewels. Yeah, yeah, they are, and and it's part of the balance between all these houses, Like these houses are not going to wage open war against each other, but of course they end up waging all of these kind of uh you know, medieval um campaigns against each other,

these wars of assassins and so forth. Yes, So while yeah, that that that's a great point of analogy. I mean, I don't know how to evaluate the claim that nuclear weapons prevented the US and the Soviet Union firm directly going to war with each other. I don't I don't know how to know if that's true or not. But it's certainly not true that more and more powerful weapons stop wars from happening. Wars are still happening all the time.

And I also kind of like maybe maybe then you would say, well, the problem is that not everybody has nuclear weapons, right, like nuclear armed powers or more technological powers can wage wars against less technologically armed powers. Uh. So then you would have to say, well, maybe the way to solve that problem is for everybody to have nuclear weapons. That doesn't sound like a great idea either. Yeah, yeah, that that is not an argument that that really convinces me.

You kind of get into the similar area where it's like, well if it's just if if every place is just a wild West town where everyone has a six shooter, then you're not going to have shootouts. Uh you know that sort of argument. Um, you know you can, you can tease that apart for for smaller scale situations. But yeah,

when you're talking about nation states, I'm I'm less convinced personally. Nevertheless, I mean people people do still show this strain of thinking that like technological superiority will eventually make fighting impossible. Like some people still do seem to think that way, And I wonder like would that ever be possible? Would it would that ever be true? Could you ever have a Even if you want to take the best scenario there, you're not actually talking about just like dominating the world

and crushing all possible to sin. Let's say you're only talking about defensive weapons that would say protect your homeland from invasion or something. But I've bean but in the nuclear example, like all defensive nuclear weapons are offensive nuclear weapons exactly. It's the theory of of the only defenses retaliation is the threat of retaliation. And we saw this in the last episode where we talked about the idea of this came out of the bomber threat. The idea

is the bomber always gets through. You can't stop the bomber planes from reaching your cities. The only thing that is a deterrent from to keep people from bombing you is the threat that if they bomb you, you'll bomb them, right, And of course there's a man we could we could really go down the rabbit hole with with with the discussing atomic weapons, and we may have to come back

to them in the future. But you know, ultimately, with all these cases, you I think you kilds argue that these are all situations where the technological abilities of of of human conflict have certainly far outstripped the sort of conflicts that we evolved to engage in and have ultimately the mental capacity to engage in even the social capacity to engage in. Our our instincts are pretty good for

thinking about fights that involve like teeth and hands. But yeah, throw a death ray in there, and it's a it's a different scenario. Yeah. So I mean, I I guess this is my personal opinion, but I would tend to think, looking at all of this history, that it's kind of folly to engage in this you know, new technological terror.

This new weapon will finally bring about world peace. All Right, On that note, we're going to take one more break, and when we come back, we're going to get into the legacy and we're going to get into a little that science fiction that we talked about earlier. Alright, we're back. Now. There is one way that we've been talking about this this book by Fanning. Fanning points out that death ray research did come to a real and important technology to

defend against air raids. The original reason that people kept talking about it. And here's the story. So Fanning writes about how in the midnight teen thirties, British authorities invited this guy named Robert A. Watson Watt, who was superintendent of the radio Research Station at Slough to do research on death rays to shore British shair defenses. Like we talked about, like governments frequently did show actual interest in

death rays. It wasn't just popular hype. The governments were like, well, if somebody's got one, we want it. So we want to know if this can be done, and so they they asked Watson, want to see if there was any way of generating rays that could stop or destroy enemy aircraft.

And so Watson, Watt and his assistant Arnold Skip Wilkins did some tests in their lab and they concluded, as others had in the past, that it was not practical to create such a ray because in order to operate at the appropriate distance to shoot planes out of the sky from a distance, it would require just an impot possible amount of energy. And they also mentioned and that this is in fact the same thing Tesla was complaining about once he adjusted his claim from the earlier death

ray claim to the later particle beam idea. But then also uh these guys mentioned the idea that radio waves aimed at an aircraft might bounce back toward the transmitter, and this idea, of course helped form the basis of what would become radar, using radio waves to detect incoming enemy aircraft before they were overhead, allowing time to prepare

defenses against the air raid. And so the death ray story proved doubly useful for the British here because Fanning points out that the British also allowed stories about fictitious government death ray projects to circulate, sort of as a cover to substitute for the very real defensive technology that

they were developing. Like, if you let it be known that Britain is working on a death ray, it will help give the citizens comfort without revealing anything about the real new technology of defense that you're working on, which they didn't want falling into enemy hands, right, and then enemy agents they might they might be more inclined to realize, well, we have our own death ray projects, or we've we've talked to some of these these guys who are peddling it.

We know there's nothing there, We know this is or we suspect this is a fool's Errand so it provides kind of a nice cover story for something that is uh an actual technology that's going to change the shape of war and potentially a decisive technology like more precise and more miniaturized radar. I think could easily be considered one of the technological advantages that helped the Allies win the war in Europe. And there's also a strange historical connection.

So there's this British propaganda that says, yeah, we we've got a death ray, that's what we're working on, when really what they're working on is radar, which is far more useful and effective. There's another type of British propaganda to cover up the advancement of radar technology, which is related to the origin of the myth that carrots give people super ry sight. So like you've seen these old World War two era ads from Britain saying, you know,

have have have supersight like an r AF pilot. They eat carrots every day. Now, it is true that actually carrots contain beta carotene, and beta carotene turns into vitamin A when it's digested in the body, and vitamin A is important for proper eye health. But it's not like eating a surfeit of carrots will give you extra powerful eyes. You just you need vitamin A from one source or another.

Carrots are one of those sources. I have to admit that even though I've I've known this for ages, when I eat carrots, there's still a part of my brain that kind of pipes up and says, all right, eyes, here you go, this one's for you. And well that this also served a double function because one of the things was that, you know, during World War Two the British there there was food rationing. I mean a lot of things were not widely available, but carrots were one

of the things that they had in spades. This was a staple of every background garden I'm guessing exactly. Yeah, your victory garden had carrots in it so people could eat is mitch. You know, they wanted people in Britain eating carrots to support the war effort instead of like using up precious sugar or something like that. This is why all the Beatrix Potter rabbits were considered enemies of

the state at the time. I don't know, but so they want people eating carrots, and they also didn't want people to know about the advantage that RF pilots had due to radar, so the enemy would think, how are they doing this? It's carrots, It's the strategic carrot reserves that the British have at their disposal. I don't know if it worked on the enemy that way. I mean, that would be funny if they thought it did. But uh,

but at least we at least worked at home. But now you know what carrots and death rays have in common. So here's a question. When did all of the death ray hype come to an end? Like we know at some point it's not like people ever completely stopped talking about death rays, but this hype that we saw in the nineteen twenties and thirties into some degree during World

War Two. Uh, it was clearly not nearly at the same level by say the fifties and sixties, right, and certainly by the time I as a child in the eighties when I was reading my grandfather's Popular Mechanics and Popular science magazines, I I don't remember seeing anything about death rays like that was not and that's where you would see it, like that's those are the places where you would have seen like a popular obsession with this

kind of pending technology. When with those magazines have been from Uh, they were they were current, he was currently okay, so they were all you know, nineteen eighties additions but but yeah, there was no talk of that. And then also, um, you know, I think I may have alluded to this in the last episode, but certainly you begin to see a fall off in the use of of of ray guns and death rays and science fiction too. You see sort of the return to to using bullets. You see

you see that in like like Aliens. You see that. I believe in Blade Runner they do. They have more ballistic technology. He's got a gun that shoots like huge bullets are almost like rocket bullets. Or so it's like finally everyone was like, yeah, I'm kind of done with ray guns. Let's just get back to putting a big chunks of metal in people. Yeah. So ray gun fever never completely went away, but it definitely died down a

lot by the middle of the twentieth century. And the question is why, I think A big answer here is World War Two. First of all, you could say, okay, now people are reading reports from the battlefield and it's like, where are all these death rays we've been hearing about. We've been hearing about death rays for decades now, and

nobody's using them. There were there were a few news reports throughout the war that kept hinting at rumors of a German or Japanese secret weapon that many supposed to be a death ray, but there were just never any solid reports of one being used in the field. I think this clearly undercut public confidence in the idea of a death ray being a real thing. If they're real,

why aren't why aren't the major powers using them? But that doesn't mean that during the World War Two era the major powers were not still interested in death rays. There was some research that continued to go on during the period. If possible, they wanted the edge there. There was a story that even like the Nazi Albert Spear talks about having this guy coming to him who's really interested in the Nazi government acquiring death rays but he but Spear just mocks him and says, okay, I'll make

you commission or of death rays. Nazis generally not known for their their humorous quips. I guess not, but they That's that's a pretty solid burn. And of course it wasn't just some people in the German power structure, you know, the the the Allies, the Japanese. They remained interested in the idea of a death ray and carried out some research but it just never materialized. It was never practical, it would require too much energy, it didn't work at

a great enough distance. That seemed to be the major problem was that what actual real physical death ray research did take place found that, yeah, you can use you know, you can use radiant energy of some kind to to cause damage to something, it just doesn't work at a great distance. And of course, another angle to all of this too is that certainly by the close of the war, uh,

we saw the the awful potential of nuclear weapons. They had been demonstrated to horrific effects, and we're still living in the aftermath of of those demonstrations. We are still living in an age in which the threat of of their use continues to remain horror of modern life. Absolutely, I mean there was a new cutting edge, almost science fiction terror weapon to think about, and that was nuclear weapons.

And yeah, I mean, once once you had atomic bombs actually being deployed, you can see how that would replace whatever kind of attention people might have been devoting to X ray or not X rays, to death rays beforehand. And you can see that in the in the fiction of the time too. What what was big in the science fiction and you know, popular films of the nineteen fifties.

It was the atomic age monster movies. Now, I guess another thing we can point out is that sort of like directed in g weapons or ray based weapons remain in a way of physical possibility and there are actually used in some limited scenarios. You can build a lethal laser or X ray projector or something like that today, but when bullets and conventional explosives are so much cheaper and easier, they're generally the option that most militaries are

going to go for. The remains sort of special cases where you might want some kind of ray weapon, but generally speaking they're just not super practical, and for those special cases, research has of course continued up until the present day. Yeah, I mean going back to testa for instance, It's worth noting that charge particle beam weapon experiments did take place in the United States and the Soviet Union

during this Cold War. The U S Department of Defensive Strategic Defense Initiative Organization sponsored the Beam experiments aboard Rocket or Bear project in nine and an experimental prototype neutral neutral hydrogen beam weapon. Uh you know it was developed that they hoped might lead to a space weapon. Yea space weapons are a commonplace. You see the idea of of of beam weapons or directed energy weapons being talked about these days. And you know, we see other cases

again to your point, lasers, acoustic weapons as well. But but these projects, they don't play a huge role in um in in the structure of any given military or defensive or offensive strategy. At most. You might see it with the acoustic weapons. You know, you might see them used to some effect as a as an instrument of subversion or terror. Yeah. Of course, if death rays have

a true legacy, it's in science fiction. Yeah, so I figured this is probably the best time for us to talk about some of our favorite examples of the death ray or the ray gun. Um. You know, throughout the different science fiction installments, we can't cover all of them. We can't cover like the real all the real groundbreakers, but there are some fabulous ones to discuss. Oh it's

um So. One of my favorite add movies is the nineteen seventy eight Star Wars rip off Star Crashes, starring Carolyn Monroe as Stella Star and it's got this like Louisiana accent robot. Yes, I believe there's a recent mystery science theater three thousand riff of this for anyone in resident checking it out. Actually haven't watched that yet, but I have watched the movie multiple times without any riffs whatsoever, because I want the pure experience. It's also got David Hasselhoff.

It's got mar Joe Gortoner, who has a strange biography. He was like a child evangelist, like a tent revival preacher when he was a little kid, and then he grew up to try to be an actor, and so he's in this movie. And he's in my favorite scene in the movie where there's a bad guy who's shooting him, shooting him with a laser gun. Uh, and he says the bad guys says, no one can survive these deadly rays.

And then mar Joe turns the rays back on the villain and says, these deadly rays will be your death. He's laser proof. That is That is good writing. Oh oh man. Some of my favorites, Um, there was did you ever see nineteen nine Teenagers from Outer Space? I don't recall if I've seen. Oh wait a minute, I think there's also an old mystery science theater of that,

isn't there? There is? And then and then the scene that that I'm referencing here was also used in It came from Hollywood that you know, the classic mash up of of different classic Hollywood sci fi trailers and whatnot. But there's a scene where the the UFO lands like in the desert and a dog, a little dog is yapping at it, and the top of the UFO opens. Uh, spaceman peeks out and he blasts the dog with a death ray and the death and the dog just turns

to two bones immediately. Oh yeah, it's a great little bit of you know, simple special effects because they just it's like there's a dog and then they cut to the skeleton standing and then collapsing. I I don't abide violence against dogs and film. It was completely painless though dog did not suffer um and was silence as Tesla would have wanted. I always loved the death rays that you see in the Rocky R Picture Show. Riff Raff and Magenta bust out some really cool trident death rays.

At the end, Richard O'Brien is a death ray though he is he is um and uh he has that fabulous costume with the ponytail and uh yeah, I love the three pronged death ray one of my favorites. Um the phasers of Star Trek certainly come to mind as as just classic directed energy weapons essentially death rays, though they of course can be set to stun instead. We see blasters throughout the Star Wars movies, and lightsabers are ultimately an extension of the same idea. Yeah, it's like

a solid death ray. Yeah, you know. I think that ray guns became and have remained popular in mass market sci fi media for one of the same reasons that they were popular in in reality during the death ray praise in the twenties and thirties, which is which is the idea that they were clean. You know, think of like the muddy, bloody, depressing, dirty, confusing horror of World War One soldiers just blasted to pieces by artillery and

burned with mustard gas. Uh cities bombed people burning like the death ray is a way of making war and violence seem clean and hold you like there's not a lot of blood or you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah, so many times, and I think oftentimes it's just because it's cheap. It's a great it's a great way to have sci fi violence in your your low budget feature is that just you shoot them with the death ray and they fall down. You don't even need the crazy

bones effect exactly. I mean, remember the quote from that Tesla article where it says like an army of a million dead and not even a powerful microscope would reveal what catastrophe had caused the destruction. It just seems like there's no blood, that's just a vaporization, just gone. It's so sanitized in ways that, Like, I think back to watching Star Wars as a child, and I recently rewatched it for the first time and got probably a decade

or more. I watched it with my my my six year old son, and they're blasting each other and they're presumably Stormtroopers are dying all over the place, but you don't really think about it. And and even that scene where an entire planet is destroyed by the Death Star's massive death ray, um, I as a kid, I never really thought about the fact that this was just an act of just pure genocide by the Empire. It was just like, oh, they just blew something up and you

know it the planet and lays upset about it. But it did feel very sanitized. You could almost you could almost like sympathize with the empire on that with really stopping to think that, oh, they just killed so many innocent people. Yeah, well, in fiction, in film, like you're talking about it, because it's like this, it has the advantages, the twofold advantage of sort of getting around the sensors

by not showing all the blood and guts. So it's just it makes violence less slimy and icky, but then also being cheaper, Like I think you were saying this a minute ago, like you don't need the effects of all that. So it's advantageous in films and fiction for that reason. But I think it's sort of similar why it was so appealing to people in the twenties and thirties.

In reality you were like, I could have a weapon in my country that would allow me to feel safe and defended without forcing me to think about like all of the body parts and stuff that they would be left behind after that weapon does its business. It makes war seem clean. And this actually brings me back to what we talked about in our episode on the guillotine, Like the whole idea there was that maybe you know a machine for beheading people in a place where you've

already got capital punishment. Uh. The idea behind the creation of the guillotine was that it would actually be more humane because it would make it a cleaner, more mechanical, less uh, you know, less prone to error, and less bloody and nasty process. But do you actually is it is that necessarily a good thing to sanitize the process? Does that actually make it easier to do violence when it's less when it's less chaotic and gory. Yeah, it perhaps it invites us to lose sight of the true

horrors involved in it. We get that, we get that sanitized G I. Joe cartoon version of warfare, which doesn't seem all that horrifying, seems fun. They were just watching all these different toys fly around, and every time a plane explodes, a parachute is deployed. Uh, and people rarely ever die. Yeah, And you know what I think, I'm with the film director Paul Verhoeven on the idea that gratuitous violence is not when a movie has lots of

blood and guts and gore. Gratuitous violence is when there's tons of violence and you see no effects and feel nothing. Yeah. That this was I remember seeing a similar argument made about Conan the Barbarian, the idea that yes, there's violence in the film, but but and and it's it's it's some of it's very rough to watch, but that arguable it all means something like it doesn't get into that gratuitous area there. Uh. That being said, I'm a little

over traditional ballistics. I think in science fiction I'd like to see more of a return to ray guns and death rays. Yeah. I don't know, It's just it seems like I've I've I've watched a lot of people get shot in science fiction over the years, and I'm ready for more ray guns, I think, to take it down

a notch. Hollywood producers, are you listening accommodate Robert's desires here? Yeah, give us some good ray guns, or you could go the route of Warren Ellis in the comics series trans Metropolitan. I believe there's a ray gun that causes intestinal discomfort. It just makes you poop yourself. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, So when we could just see that in more science fiction installments, Robert, this exploration of death rays has proven far more rich and deep and interesting than I even

imagined it would be. And I had high hopes. Yeah, what it illuminates in a lot of of actual technologies and just what was going on in the the science sentific zeitgeist at the time. So yeah, this was the fun. This was a fun too parter and it also touched on areas that we may return to in the future in future episodes of Invention. And if you want to explore past episodes of Invention, head on over to invention pod dot com. That is the homepage for the series.

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