THE enemy wasted no time firing up the death rays once they arrived in Woking. Generated in an almost perfectly insulating chamber, and focused by a parabolic mirror of unknown composition, these scorchingly intense beams of heat energy rained untold destruction on the dormitory town in Surrey, just to the south-west of London. “Whatever is combustible flashes into flame at its touch, lead runs like water, it softens iron, cracks and melts glass, and when it falls upon water, incontinently that explodes into steam,” an observer wrote.
This isn’t reality – unless something untoward is currently stirring in the suburbs – but a scene from H.G. Wells’s 1898 classic about Martian invasion, The War of the Worlds. Where Wells blazed a trail, many others have followed. From the ray guns wielded by Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon to Star Trek phasers and the planet-destroying Death Star in Star Wars, weapons formed of fearsomely energetic beams have become a sci-fi staple.
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What has been largely forgotten are the efforts, over decades in the early 20th century, to make real-world death rays. It is a story of egos, charlatanry, deception – and dark comedy.
As so often, Wells was ahead of his time, but also very much of his time. At the turn of the 20th century, new types of radiation were in the news. Heinrich Hertz proved the existence of radio waves in 1887, Wilhelm Röntgen produced X-rays in 1895, and alpha, beta and gamma rays soon followed.
In the ensuing years, an arms race developed as Europe drifted towards war – and the new technology loomed large in many a mind. In 1913, a 32-year-old Italian inventor, Giulio Ulivi, claimed that a new form of invisible infrared radiation that he called F-rays could deliver enough energy through the air to detonate gunpowder 16 kilometres away. Armed with F-ray generators, he said, an army could discharge enemy bullets and artillery, detonate their munitions and blow up attacking ships from the shore.
French military officials pricked up their ears, but . The Italian navy, meanwhile, gave him money to build a lab. By 1914, Ulivi claimed his F-rays had blown up mines and torpedoes in an Italian river, and a public test was scheduled.
By now, though, things were highly charged in another sense. Ulivi had fallen in love with Maria Luisa Fornari, the daughter of the Italian admiral supervising the experiments. The admiral insisted Ulivi finish his work before marriage, but the couple instead eloped, amid by spiking the explosive with sodium that exploded when water leaked in. Certainly it seems he only used his own explosives, and his tests only ever worked under water.
Others were also lured by the ray technologies. On the other side of the Atlantic, they fascinated Nikola Tesla, the electrical engineer and polymath. The same year The War of the Worlds was published, he had used radio waves to control a model boat, and in 1899 showed he could send electricity short distances through the air. He soon claimed he could beam electric power across the Atlantic, and in 1901 talked financier J.P. Morgan into giving him $150,000 – more than $4 million today – to build the 57-metre-high on Long Island near New York to show it off.
Electric air
The physics was dodgy, and Tesla burned through the money before he could test the idea. In March 1916, with the US yet to enter the first world war, Tesla told The Electrical Experimenter magazine that he could detonate explosives hundreds of kilometres away with wireless power. The magazine’s cover, headlined ““, shows a heat-generating tower on the shoreline and ships exploding out at sea. It may have been a last-gasp attempt to drum up more publicity and cash: in 1917, Tesla’s creditors had the Wardenclyffe tower torn down for scrap.
It was left largely to a British inventor and entrepreneur called Harry Grindell Matthews to continue flying the flag for death rays. He was a veteran of the Boer war in South Africa, which in 1901 had seen British forces using Guglielmo Marconi’s newly minted radio telegraphs to communicate. In 1909, then 29 and living with his mother in Rudgeway just north of Bristol, Grindell Matthews patented a wireless radio telephone system. He raised money to found the Grindell Matthews Wireless Telephone Company, which by 1911 was offering “Aerophones” with an 8-kilometre range for under £20, equivalent to around £2000 today.
The company failed in 1914, and a series of largely unsuccessful military and business ventures followed. But the advent of aerial and rocket warfare during the first world war saw a further uptick of interest in death rays as a means of countering enemy attacks from the sky. “Under the attack of these electric waves the airplane will fall as though struck by a thunderbolt, the tank will burst into flames, the dreadnought will blow up, poison gas will be dispersed,” wrote French Army chief general Marie-Eugène Debeney in The New York Times in September 1921. When several French planes flying over Bavaria were forced to make emergency landings in 1923, French officials suspected Germany had a wireless electric ray weapon, spurring a desire to have one of their own.
Sensing an opportunity, by 1924 Grindell Matthews was divulging to a London meeting of the Foreign Press Association details of an invention that would, he said, make war impossible. His death ray would ionise air by illuminating it with ultraviolet light so it could conduct electricity. Press reports claimed it could stop planes, ignite their wings, destroy one in 5 seconds or even wipe out whole armies. Upon hearing that the ray had killed a mouse from 20 metres away, on 24 April 1924 Winston Churchill – at the time out of office, Parliament and party, but soon to become chancellor of the exchequer – wrote to a friend, the physicist Frederick Alexander Lindemann, that it was worth investigating, but “it may all be a hoax”.
The idea wasn’t daft: ultraviolet light can ionise atoms in air, and the ions do conduct electricity. But it meant concentrating the ultraviolet light along the whole path to the target, and cranking the voltage to a level enough to fire a deadly bolt of electricity. On 26 May, following questions in Parliament, a demonstration was set up at Grindell Matthews’s London lab. The best the death ray could do was stall a motorcycle engine about 14 metres away. The Air Ministry was unimpressed, but offered to pay Grindell Matthews £1000 if he could stop a larger engine in a government-run test.
Himself unimpressed by the level of this largesse, Grindell Matthews hotfooted it to Croydon aerodrome, south of London, to head for Paris. In a veritable French farce, his British investors set out in pursuit brandishing an injunction barring him from leaving the country. He had taken off before they got to Croydon.
In France, Grindell Matthews made an promoting his death ray that was shown in London and New York movie theatres. To a jolly piano accompaniment, the inventor shows how it wirelessly lights a bulb and detonates a small pile of gunpowder. Words flashed on the screen claim that “Within 15 Years The Machine Gun will only be found in Museums” and “Thus the Grindell-Matthews Death Ray, in the future, may control the destiny of the world”.
Doubts soon surfaced, however. The physicist Ernest Rutherford, who had discovered alpha, beta and gamma rays, warned government officials to avoid Grindell Matthews. A former collaborator, Irish physicist E.E. Fournier d’Albe, called the death ray a “myth” that the British public wanted to believe because of the scars left by the first world war.
“The best the death ray did was stall a motorbike engine 14 metres away”
With no credible results to show, death rays faded from the news. Grindell Matthews spent a few years in the US promoting other unsuccessful inventions, but by 1932 was back in the UK. Owing creditors more than £11,000, he told a bankruptcy court he had earned only £3300 since 1924. Prosperity finally arrived in 1938, three years before his death, when he married the wannabe opera singer Ganna Walska, whose previous four husbands included a couple of millionaires.
Trump card
In the 1930s, with another war looming, the British Air Ministry decided the best defence against enemy bombers wasn’t zapping them down, but targeting them with radar that could direct anti-aircraft fire. But it didn’t shut the door completely: the ministry still offered £1000 to anyone who could demonstrate a death ray that could kill a sheep from a hundred yards away. It seems no one could.
In the US, Tesla still occasionally talked about death rays, and in 1934 he announced he had invented a “death beam” that would fire a beam of tiny particles as far as Earth’s curvature allowed. When he died in 1943, the US War Department sent an expert on high-voltage engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, John G. Trump, to go through his papers for anything of military interest. The professor found that in 1935 the Soviet Union had paid Tesla $25,000 for his plans, but never got the thing to work. Nothing else was of much military value, Trump wrote: most of Tesla’s highly regarded work had been done in the previous century, and his more recent ideas were largely speculative.
The professor’s nephew, the current US commander-in-chief Donald J. Trump, is famously proud of his big nuclear button. Yet despite billions of dollars spent on energy weapons, the unstoppable death ray remains out of anyone’s reach. Unless some alien civilisation has cracked it: citizens of Woking, stay woke.
This article appeared in print under the headline “Ray burn”
