The death ray, also called the death beam, is a type of weapon that uses particles or electromagnetic energy. It was first imagined by scientists in the 1920s and 1930s. During this time, inventors like Guglielmo Marconi, Nikola Tesla, Harry Grindell Matthews, Edwin R. Scott, Erich Graichen, and others claimed they had created it separately. In 1957, the National Inventors Council still listed the death ray as one of the inventions needed for military use.

Although the death ray is often found in stories, research about energy-based weapons inspired by these early ideas has led to real weapons used today. For example, the United States Navy uses a system called the Laser Weapon System (LaWS), which was introduced in 2014. These weapons are officially called directed-energy weapons.

History

In 1923, Edwin R. Scott, an inventor from San Francisco, said he was the first to create a death ray that could harm people and damage planes from a distance. He was born in Detroit and claimed he studied for nine years under Charles P. Steinmetz. In 1924, Harry Grindell-Matthews tried to sell a death ray to the British Air Ministry but never showed a working model or demonstrated it to the military.

Nikola Tesla claimed to have invented a "death beam," which he called teleforce, in the 1930s. He continued to make these claims until his death. Tesla explained that his invention did not use rays because they lose strength quickly over distance. He said that even if all the energy from New York City were turned into rays and sent 20 miles, it would not harm a person. Instead, his device used tiny particles that could carry large amounts of energy over long distances. Tesla said his invention could protect a country from attacks by creating a powerful barrier. He claimed to have worked on the project since about 1900 and said it used power from the ionosphere, a layer of energy around Earth. He used a 50-foot Tesla coil to help with the invention. The "well known law of physics" Tesla mentioned refers to the inverse-square law, which explains how rays weaken as they travel farther.

In 1934, Antonio Longoria said he had a death ray that could kill pigeons from four miles away and could kill a mouse inside a thick metal container.

During World War II, Germany had at least two projects and Japan had one to create death rays. One German project, led by Ernst Schiebold, involved a particle accelerator with beryllium rods moving through a vertical axis. Another project was developed by Rolf Widerøe and is mentioned in his biography. Widerøe’s machine was in a lab in Dresden in February 1945 when the city was bombed. In March 1945, Widerøe led a team to move the device from the damaged lab to General Patton’s 3rd Army at Burggrub. The device was taken into U.S. custody on April 14, 1945. Japan’s weapon, called "Ku-Go," aimed to use microwaves produced by a large magnetron.

In science fiction

The idea of a death ray first appeared in science fiction stories as early as 1898 in H. G. Wells' novel The War of the Worlds and in Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy's 1927 book The Garin Death Ray. Later, science fiction stories introduced the idea of a raygun that can be held in the hand, used by characters like Flash Gordon. In Alfred Noyes' 1940 novel The Last Man (also called No Other Man in the United States), a death ray created by a German scientist named Mardok is used during a global war and nearly destroys the human race. Similar weapons also appear in spy-fi movies like Murderers' Row and in George Lucas' science-fiction story Star Wars.