Death rays: How the dream of an ultimate weapon became a dark farce

The quest for the ultimate destructive weapon is a convoluted story of egos, charlatanry and deception – with a starring role for mercurial genius Nikola Tesla

By Jeff Hecht

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.

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.