Speaker 1: Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert Lamb and
Speaker 1: I'm Joe McCormick. And hey, we are back for part
Speaker 1: two of our discussion about the death ray. Last time
Speaker 1: we we went ended up talking about death rays for
Speaker 1: a really long time and still had tons of stuff
Speaker 1: to say. Yeah, if you didn't listen to that first episode,
Speaker 1: definitely go back and and give it a listen, because
Speaker 1: that's the episode that's going to really get into the mythology,
Speaker 1: that's going to get into the ancient history and take
Speaker 1: us up into the modern era. This episode is going
Speaker 1: to be really more about the legacy of the death ray. Uh.
Speaker 1: You know, usually what amounts for the second half of
Speaker 1: a normal episode of Invention, the post Harry Grindel Matthews period,
Speaker 1: the post Grindel walled period, as you might put it. Uh. So,
Speaker 1: I guess we should do a real brief refresher on
Speaker 1: what we talked about last time. So we talked about
Speaker 1: how during the first half of the twentieth century, especially
Speaker 1: in the nineteen twenties and thirties, there were all these
Speaker 1: news were ports about a new technology on the cusp
Speaker 1: of realization, and it was the death ray. This was
Speaker 1: some kind of directed energy weapon, most often characterized as
Speaker 1: harnessing the power of electricity, but sometimes also described as
Speaker 1: working on the basis of invisible particle beams, heat rays,
Speaker 1: radio or radio waves, radium rays, X rays, or other
Speaker 1: hypothetical exotic powers, such as the nameless force of the
Speaker 1: con artist James C. Wingarde remember him, or the so
Speaker 1: called f rays of Giulio U Levi which were later
Speaker 1: I think renamed M rays and who knows what after that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And that one especially was this mix of you know,
Speaker 1: possibly you know, some sort of technological um trickery that
Speaker 1: was taking place, some sort of seems like there may
Speaker 1: have been some sort of wave effect that he was utilizing.
Speaker 1: But on the other hand, there was definitely some trickery. Uh,
Speaker 1: definitely some some underhanded salesmanship when it came to marketing
Speaker 1: this wonder weapon to different nation states. Leivie probably would
Speaker 1: have made a good stage magician, Yes, And I think that,
Speaker 1: And that's one of the comparisons we kept making, like
Speaker 1: does this sound more like a demonstration of a weapon technology,
Speaker 1: more more like a David Copperfield stunt. Well, Levi's career
Speaker 1: started this pattern that we would see just again and
Speaker 1: again and again throughout the history of these death ray inventors,
Speaker 1: which is, they come out with a claim, they say,
Speaker 1: I've got a death ray does amazing things, and then
Speaker 1: they either will not demonstrate their technology publicly and then
Speaker 1: it just kind of goes away, or they do demonstrations,
Speaker 1: but they tightly control the conditions of those demonstrations and
Speaker 1: have to like kind of be around to set things
Speaker 1: up ahead of time, which makes you wonder if there's
Speaker 1: tricker going on. Uh. So, of course we also talked
Speaker 1: about the myths last time, like the myth of bal
Speaker 1: Or Baylor. How do you say that Balor I believe, Yeah,
Speaker 1: the wonderful death gaze underneath his giant lid. Uh. And
Speaker 1: then we talked about why these claims of the thray
Speaker 1: invention were so popular, especially in this one historical period
Speaker 1: of like the nineteen twenties and thirties, And so we
Speaker 1: cited this book called death Rays and the Popular Media
Speaker 1: eighteen seventy six to nineteen thirty nine, a study of
Speaker 1: directed energy weapons in fact, fiction, and film by William J.
Speaker 1: Fanning Jr. From which I think correctly makes the connection
Speaker 1: between the fascination with death rays and the paranoia people
Speaker 1: felt after World War One that the new technology of
Speaker 1: aerial bombing and chemical weapons would mean that the next
Speaker 1: war between the great powers, often referred to in the newspapers,
Speaker 1: just as the next war, would be apocalyptic in the
Speaker 1: scale of its death toll, unless we could find some
Speaker 1: way to stop the bomber planes before they reach their
Speaker 1: targets in in the civilian areas, or or if they
Speaker 1: could just stop war altogether. And of course, the idea
Speaker 1: of the death ray filled this gap of defensive technology
Speaker 1: in people's minds, because without without imagining a death ray,
Speaker 1: people would just be forced to contemplate the fact that
Speaker 1: the bombers could always reach them. And then, finally, we
Speaker 1: also discussed the story of Harry Grendel Matthews, and English
Speaker 1: electrical engineer who set off this media firestorm in the
Speaker 1: year nineteen twenty four with a well publicized campaign of
Speaker 1: claims that he had invented a death ray which could
Speaker 1: stop airplane motors at a distance or kill armies with
Speaker 1: a beam of electricity. And we talked about the short
Speaker 1: film that he had made to promote this invention, though
Speaker 1: ultimately Grendel Matthews was never able to demonstrate that his
Speaker 1: Invention did what he claimed, at least not in a
Speaker 1: reliable or reproducible way. And if you want to watch
Speaker 1: that short film, I have a link to it on
Speaker 1: the landing page for this and the previous episode of
Speaker 1: Invention at our website invention pod dot com. I recommend it.
Speaker 1: It's it's like Buster Keaton aside. It's one of the
Speaker 1: funniest silent movies I've seen. Yes, it is unintentionally hilarious.
Speaker 1: Uh So. Harry Grendel Matthews, though, was far from the
Speaker 1: only guy running the death Ray racket. We've discussed a
Speaker 1: few of the people who came before him are around
Speaker 1: the same time with related claims. Many many people came
Speaker 1: after him. It seems like Grendall Matthews really just got
Speaker 1: the death ray racket. He inspired an army of followers. Yeah,
Speaker 1: if if he were doing it today, he would have
Speaker 1: a pretty entertaining Kickstarter page, I think. But this was
Speaker 1: this was how you kicked off your projects back then.
Speaker 1: You were just kind of like the idea of the
Speaker 1: lone inventor in his lab going out and selling his
Speaker 1: wares with the vaudevillian style. I'm looking for investors, so
Speaker 1: I'm going to France, I'm going to England, going to
Speaker 1: the United States. Who's gonna get Who's going to get
Speaker 1: the death ray? Yeah, and and again it's just kind
Speaker 1: of crazy to to look at these examples where they're
Speaker 1: just going around. They're talking to uh, you know, to Italy,
Speaker 1: to France, to the to to to England, then going
Speaker 1: over to Russia peddling their super weapon, you know, and
Speaker 1: what today would seem insane. It would be like James
Speaker 1: Bond villain level of of danger here, And a lot
Speaker 1: of these newspaper reports do have a very James Bond
Speaker 1: villain kind of feel to them. In fact, one of
Speaker 1: the points Fanning made that we talked about last time
Speaker 1: was how a lot of these death ray stories, you
Speaker 1: often would assume that the obsession with them in the
Speaker 1: public came from science fiction, but actually he says, it's
Speaker 1: sort of the other way around, Like a lot of
Speaker 1: the fictional death rays and fictional mad scientists were very
Speaker 1: similar to stuff you could read about in all kinds
Speaker 1: in newspaper articles all the time in the twenties and thirties. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So this was a case where the science fiction was
Speaker 1: born out of the out of the science. Yeah. Or
Speaker 1: the supposed science the the what was classed as nonfiction
Speaker 1: reports about science, but a lot of it turned out
Speaker 1: to be tricker what seemed to be the technological trajectory.
Speaker 1: And in the same way that you know, everyone always
Speaker 1: brings up flying cars, of course, and we have all
Speaker 1: these wonderful examples of flying car like vehicles in our
Speaker 1: science fiction and it was based in a large large
Speaker 1: part on the idea that this seemed to be the trajectory,
Speaker 1: like this seems to be where we're going, so we're
Speaker 1: populating our visions of the future with this idea. I
Speaker 1: think actually the death ray in the flying car will
Speaker 1: have some very interesting parallels because in both cases these
Speaker 1: are examples of things which are not in any way
Speaker 1: prohibited by the laws of physics, Like you can make
Speaker 1: these things, it's just a question of whether they are
Speaker 1: in fact practical when you could accomplish the same goals
Speaker 1: roughly with much much cheaper and more efficient stuff. And
Speaker 1: by the way, we will be discussing some of our
Speaker 1: favorite science fiction death rays later on in the podcast,
Speaker 1: more towards the end. Yes, so Fanning refers to this
Speaker 1: period between Grindall, Matthew's Big media splash around nineteen twenty
Speaker 1: four and the outbreak of the Second World War, so
Speaker 1: basically nineteen to nineteen thirty nine as the death ray craze,
Speaker 1: and he points out that during this period, claims of
Speaker 1: death ray inventions were constantly appearing in the media, often
Speaker 1: from frauds and con men, but also from like real
Speaker 1: scientists who apparently just had enthusiasm for what they might
Speaker 1: be able to do. Well. Talk about some of those real,
Speaker 1: very credible scientists later on who uh thought, who you know,
Speaker 1: thought that they could make a death ray, but also
Speaker 1: from this class of sort of enthusiastic amateur inventors who
Speaker 1: seem to be true believers in their own work, but
Speaker 1: without much of an understanding of the underlying physics. This
Speaker 1: is something we'll have to keep in mind when eventually
Speaker 1: we come back around and discuss uh attempts at zero
Speaker 1: gravity technology, because you see a very similar thing, amateurs
Speaker 1: coming along and creating something that may appear to be
Speaker 1: zero gravity but is not. I want to talk about
Speaker 1: one particular example of the many many can we call
Speaker 1: him ray gu entrepreneurs like that? Yeah, the ray entrepreneurs
Speaker 1: who appeared in this post. Grendel Matthews period. I want
Speaker 1: to look at a fellow named Maurice Francill. Now Fanning
Speaker 1: cites this guy in his book, but I actually looked
Speaker 1: up an original newspaper article from October ninety. I think
Speaker 1: it's a wire service article, but this version was in
Speaker 1: the Danville Morning News and it was basically too good
Speaker 1: not to read in full. I think, because this is
Speaker 1: this is a local story for us, right right. This
Speaker 1: guy he gave he showed up at an expo in Atlanta,
Speaker 1: So maybe we can. Robert, you want to trade off
Speaker 1: reading parts of this article here, certainly I'll start here,
Speaker 1: dateline Atlanta. Will the radio death ray make future war impossible?
Speaker 1: Maurice Francill, American radio wizard, thinks it will. However, should
Speaker 1: there ever be another conflict between nations, france Hill predicts
Speaker 1: that the weapons used will be poison gas and light
Speaker 1: radio death dealing waves, annihilating hundreds at a time. Francil,
Speaker 1: who admits he stumbled on the death ray by accident,
Speaker 1: told the recent radio exposition here that he plans to
Speaker 1: ask the governor of some state for the privilege of
Speaker 1: demonstrating its death dealing properties on some condemned murderer. The
Speaker 1: day is not far distant, said Francil, when death ray
Speaker 1: and radio waves will be used by police to stop
Speaker 1: engines of speeders and bandits. The death ray is only
Speaker 1: slightly different from the radio wave, but it is too
Speaker 1: deadly for radio amateurs to be permitted to experiment with.
Speaker 1: Just think what it would have meant to the police
Speaker 1: of Elizabeth, New Jersey when they were pursuing the mall robberts.
Speaker 1: Bullets could not stop the fleeing bandits, but radio waves
Speaker 1: properly applied would have halted them. The same force, applied
Speaker 1: in a slightly different manner, can be employed to start
Speaker 1: fires at a distance, and such action necessarily would explode powder.
Speaker 1: Its use can be carried even further so as to
Speaker 1: supersede explosives in times of war. The deadly effects of
Speaker 1: violets in certain forms, X rays and similar waves are
Speaker 1: well known. I have the wave that is deadly, but
Speaker 1: it is too dangerous for radio amateurs to know. So
Speaker 1: I love already. By ninety we're seeing some creep of
Speaker 1: the concept. Right like it starts always with this high
Speaker 1: minded like we're gonna end war. We will make war impossible.
Speaker 1: It's time for world peace. The death ray will do it.
Speaker 1: And the hook here is still that it will make
Speaker 1: war impossible or at least stop the bombers that are
Speaker 1: coming to kill civilians by the millions. But Maurice here
Speaker 1: apparently just can't help himself and almost immediately starts drooling
Speaker 1: about incinerating criminals and begging governors to give him a
Speaker 1: prisoner to vaporize, and also going on about how the
Speaker 1: ray is mine, It's all mine, no one else can
Speaker 1: have it. You know, this brings me back to the
Speaker 1: Guillotine episode, you know, where we talked about the how
Speaker 1: inevitably a new technology comes along, somebody is going to say,
Speaker 1: let's execute people with this, yes, and and here we
Speaker 1: have the exact same situation, granted with the technology that
Speaker 1: has not actually come to fruition, but already they're thinking
Speaker 1: we could execute prisoners with this. Well, this is another
Speaker 1: version of what happened with the electric chair. You know.
Speaker 1: The electric chair was that conclusion brought to fruition in
Speaker 1: the wired electricity era, and now they're essentially trying to
Speaker 1: do the same thing for the wireless energy era, and
Speaker 1: thank goodness it didn't catch on. I the idea of say,
Speaker 1: essentially microwaving are our prisoners is a little unsettling. I
Speaker 1: don't think that, Like if you go back and you
Speaker 1: play the type of history again, I don't think it's
Speaker 1: impossible that something like that would have happened. I mean,
Speaker 1: people are always interested in trying new technology, like you're saying,
Speaker 1: to to get retributive justice against against people who they
Speaker 1: believe have done wrong, like so many people have this
Speaker 1: bizarre science fiction uh corporal punishment lust. And granted, I
Speaker 1: could also see where someone could have made the argument like, well,
Speaker 1: the death ray, that's the best way, the most humane
Speaker 1: way to execute somebody. That's exactly what they would have said. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it will be quick and painless, you know, far better
Speaker 1: than those older technologies. I guess we can be glad
Speaker 1: that didn't happen. No, like Georgia governor said go for it.
Speaker 1: As far as I know, no governor ever gave him
Speaker 1: a prisoner to demonstrate on uh so. A couple of
Speaker 1: other ones mentioned in fanning that I just couldn't pass
Speaker 1: up mentioning because they're pretty weird. One is in nineteen
Speaker 1: six and English musseur and osteopath named Ibbotson said he
Speaker 1: had invented a ray that could go through six ft
Speaker 1: of lead, work as an electrical gun shooting seven inch bullets,
Speaker 1: work as a remote control for a boat, turns steel
Speaker 1: to powder, weld brass and steel together, and petrify silk.
Speaker 1: M what does that mean? I don't know. I know
Speaker 1: you can't iron silk. Really, that is my understanding. Yes,
Speaker 1: that if you iron it, you destroy it. Okay, learn
Speaker 1: something new every day. Uh. Oh, here's another good one
Speaker 1: that Fanning mentions, the plague ray. Oh. This this is
Speaker 1: a great title because this sounds like it's legitimately a
Speaker 1: technology from like the Warhammer forty k universe that like
Speaker 1: plague marines would be using to to uh you know,
Speaker 1: to to to zap enemy marines with some sort of
Speaker 1: awful infection. It sounds to me like a lesser legoty movie.
Speaker 1: But so. In nineteen thirty three, a professor oh A Newell,
Speaker 1: head of research at the National League of Health in London,
Speaker 1: said he had a wireless ray that could transmit diseases
Speaker 1: such as anthrax. I have a hard time imagining how
Speaker 1: that could possibly work. Uh, something seems missing there. But
Speaker 1: this is just a tiny, tiny taste. There are just
Speaker 1: so many guys with death rays. Fanning documents them exhaustively.
Speaker 1: I don't know how how to count how many of
Speaker 1: these stories appeared in different UH newspapers throughout the twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties, but it's at least dozens, maybe over a
Speaker 1: hundred that he documents here, And it's just they're they're very,
Speaker 1: very common, repeating themes, like very often the inventor says
Speaker 1: the death ray will end all war or make war impossible,
Speaker 1: claims it can stop airplanes or and kill or disable
Speaker 1: humans at a distance. I think this is consistent with
Speaker 1: everything we've been talking about so far, because there's all
Speaker 1: this fear of the next war, and the main part
Speaker 1: of that fear being the terror of aerial bombing. But
Speaker 1: there's other common weirdness that keeps showing up, Like there
Speaker 1: were at least a handful of stories that all contained
Speaker 1: the detail that the inventor promised a death ray and
Speaker 1: then claimed they had been burglarized and the plans had
Speaker 1: been stolen. How convenient. Yes, And it liigns up with
Speaker 1: what we saw with an examples in the last episode,
Speaker 1: where as as an interested party begins asking more questions
Speaker 1: and asking for more control over experiments and and um
Speaker 1: and demonstrations. Suddenly the technology is not working as well,
Speaker 1: Suddenly there are problems. So this seems like the next
Speaker 1: logical step, like oops, it was stolen. Sorry, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: And I think this highlights that tons of people making
Speaker 1: these kind of claims were either either totally in over
Speaker 1: their heads and they made a claim and then couldn't
Speaker 1: back it up, or they were just frauds from the beginning.
Speaker 1: But there were actual, real scientists and real inventors who
Speaker 1: were at least claiming to be involved in this kind
Speaker 1: of research, and there were some government projects that looked
Speaker 1: into it throughout this period. And I think maybe we
Speaker 1: should explore one of these big name scientists who got
Speaker 1: into the death ray business. When we come back from
Speaker 1: a break. All right, we're back, so everybody's probably wonder
Speaker 1: who's it going to be. Well, it's Nicola Tesla, of
Speaker 1: course it's Tesla. So Nicola Tesla, the you know, the famous,
Speaker 1: the famous engineer, scientists, inventor, arch enemy of Edison. This
Speaker 1: is this is one of the biggest names in legitimate
Speaker 1: scientific and technological innovation of the electricity era. I mean,
Speaker 1: this guy, this guy is the real deal. He's not
Speaker 1: a con artist, right, And really he's a guy that
Speaker 1: has become I feel like his star has only risen
Speaker 1: over the past ten fifteen years as people have learned
Speaker 1: more about him, and he's just become kind of an
Speaker 1: online cult figure. Yeah, totally. I think there were several
Speaker 1: memes or comic strips about him at some point that
Speaker 1: didn't really popular. Even a video game where he battles
Speaker 1: HP Lovecraft. Now I didn't know that, and Lovecraft is
Speaker 1: the villain. I did not know that, but I would
Speaker 1: play that game. It looks fun. It looks fun. So
Speaker 1: at various times throughout the nineteen thirties and maybe beforehand,
Speaker 1: but definitely in the thirties, Tesla claimed to have created
Speaker 1: some kind of ray or beam or electrical weapon that
Speaker 1: would destroy war itself. And I've read about this and
Speaker 1: it seems like he was vaguely describing somewhat different types
Speaker 1: of weapons at different times. But just to give you
Speaker 1: a flavor of the Tesla death ray hype. In an
Speaker 1: article in The New York Times from July eleventh, nineteen
Speaker 1: thirty four, the author writes, quote, this death beam, Dr.
Speaker 1: Tesla said will operate silently but effectively at distances as
Speaker 1: far as a telescope could see an object on the ground,
Speaker 1: and as far as the curvature of the earth would
Speaker 1: permit it, it will be invisible, and we'll leave no
Speaker 1: marks behind it beyond its evidence of destruction. An army
Speaker 1: of one million dead annihilated in an instant, he said,
Speaker 1: would not reveal even under the most powerful microscope, just
Speaker 1: what catastrophe had caused its destruction. It's quite a claim.
Speaker 1: Another connection to last time, it's worth noting that Grendall
Speaker 1: Matthews publicly expressed great admiration for Tesla and said that
Speaker 1: he aspired to be like him. He told his biographer
Speaker 1: that quote, whenever I had little success, which might have
Speaker 1: turned my head, I always thought of Tesla and realized
Speaker 1: that I was a mere student sitting at the feet
Speaker 1: of a great master. And and Grendelle Matthews was not
Speaker 1: a not shy about his own ability, So it's probably
Speaker 1: telling that he felt compelled to bow to Tesla on this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and so there were several Tesla claims throughout the years.
Speaker 1: One is this kind of like beam or ray weapon
Speaker 1: that would annihilate armies. Other times Tesla seemed more trying
Speaker 1: to emphasize that this was purely a defensive weapon that
Speaker 1: could be used against like enemy aircraft, and he sometimes
Speaker 1: later described it as being more like an invisible curtain
Speaker 1: that could surround a country and keep invading armies and
Speaker 1: aircraft away. Uh. Sometimes it seemed like he was talking
Speaker 1: about some kind of like charged dust that would go
Speaker 1: up like a wall in the air and keep stuff out.
Speaker 1: His His claims varied a lot over time, and this
Speaker 1: suggests to me that Tesla did not, like, really have
Speaker 1: a phototype of anything he was talking about. It sounds
Speaker 1: more like he he had some ideas and was was
Speaker 1: talking up his ideas. He seems to have seen some
Speaker 1: some scientific avenues through which one might develop certain weapons.
Speaker 1: To give you another taste of what Tesla was cooking
Speaker 1: up here, here's what he said on the matter in
Speaker 1: a ninety seven interview with George Sylvester Viract for the
Speaker 1: publication Liberty. Quote. Hitherto, all devices that could be used
Speaker 1: for defense could also be utilized to serve for aggression.
Speaker 1: This nullified the value of improvement for purposes of peace.
Speaker 1: But I was fortunate enough to evolve a new idea
Speaker 1: and to perfect means which can be used chiefly for defense.
Speaker 1: If it is adopted, it will revolutionize the relations between nations.
Speaker 1: It will make any country, large or small, impregnable against armies, airplanes,
Speaker 1: and other means of attack. My invention requires a large plant,
Speaker 1: but once it is established, it will be possible to
Speaker 1: destroy anything men or machines approach within a radius of
Speaker 1: two hundred miles. It will, so to speak, provide a
Speaker 1: wall of power, offering an insuperable obstacle against any effective aggression.
Speaker 1: If no country can be attacked successfully, there can be
Speaker 1: no purpose in war. My discovery ends the menace of
Speaker 1: airplanes or submarines, but it ensures the supremacy of the battleship.
Speaker 1: Because battleships may be provided with some of the required equipment.
Speaker 1: There might still be war at sea, but no warships
Speaker 1: could successfully attack the shoreline, as the coast equipment will
Speaker 1: be superior to the armament of any battleship. I want
Speaker 1: to state explicitly that this invention of mine does not
Speaker 1: contemplate the use of any so called death rays. Rays
Speaker 1: are not applicable because they cannot be produced in requisite
Speaker 1: quantities and diminish rapidly in intensity with distance. All the
Speaker 1: energy of New York City approximately two million horsepower transformed
Speaker 1: into rays and projected twenty miles could not kill a
Speaker 1: human being, because, according to a well known law of physics,
Speaker 1: it would disperse to such an extent as to be ineffectual.
Speaker 1: I think he's talking about the inverse square law there,
Speaker 1: which is true. My apparatus projects particles that may be
Speaker 1: relatively large or of microscopic dimensions, enabling us to convey
Speaker 1: to to a small area at a great distance trillions
Speaker 1: of times more energy than is possible with rays of
Speaker 1: any kind. Many thousands of horsepower can thus be transmitted
Speaker 1: by a stream thinner than a hair, so that nothing
Speaker 1: can resist. This wonderful feature will make it possible, among
Speaker 1: other things, to achieve undreamed of results in television, for
Speaker 1: there will be almost no limit to the intensity of illumination,
Speaker 1: the size of the picture, or distance of projection. I
Speaker 1: do not say that there may not be several destructive
Speaker 1: wars before the world accepts my gift. I may not
Speaker 1: live to see its acceptance, but I am convinced that
Speaker 1: a century from now, every nation will render itself immune
Speaker 1: from attack by my device, or by a device based
Speaker 1: upon a similar principle. So yeah, especially at the end there,
Speaker 1: despite the fact of despite how confident he is, it
Speaker 1: seems like he's still basically just hashing this out as
Speaker 1: sort of a technological thought experiment, right, And he's kind
Speaker 1: of hedging his bat there by saying, no, I may
Speaker 1: not live to see it, but this will one day
Speaker 1: be really big and it's Tesla. I mean, Tesla was
Speaker 1: a was a real inventor, a real superstar, and so
Speaker 1: people took his claim seriously, right, I mean not not
Speaker 1: everybody did, but this one. He didn't come off as
Speaker 1: an obvious fraud or con artist here. No, No, he
Speaker 1: seemed to be a very informed scientist who truly saw
Speaker 1: farther than than most of us. Yeah, and governments took
Speaker 1: him seriously too. Yeah. So he announced this idea during
Speaker 1: a press conference and attempted to gather funding for the project,
Speaker 1: but he was ultimately unable to convince backers, I guess
Speaker 1: because he didn't have a properly you know, vaudevillian demonstration
Speaker 1: or a short film prepared. However, in ninety seven, the
Speaker 1: alleged Russian arms front arm toward a trading corporation did
Speaker 1: right Tesla at check for two and um, and one
Speaker 1: stage of the technology was allegedly tested, but of course
Speaker 1: the death ray did not become a standard weapon of war. Uh.
Speaker 1: And of course war in all its appalling forms certainly continued.
Speaker 1: And of course we touched on this in the quote
Speaker 1: that we just read. But you know, he proposed the
Speaker 1: technology could be used to transmit wireless power, and it
Speaker 1: could be used to get this heat up parts of
Speaker 1: the upper atmosphere to light the sky at night. Oh,
Speaker 1: that sounds good. That yeah, that doesn't does not sound
Speaker 1: particularly safe. It seems like that could have some some
Speaker 1: effects on the local weather. Well, I mean, it's like
Speaker 1: a lot of Tesla's ideas. I mean he he was,
Speaker 1: I think undeniably a genius. But like his idea he
Speaker 1: had ideas for how to power lights in the home
Speaker 1: by like, uh, sending out electrical current that would electrify
Speaker 1: the walls inside a house, and this would induce current
Speaker 1: in a disconnected light fixture that was between the walls.
Speaker 1: It's not hard to see why this kind of thing
Speaker 1: didn't catch on, right, Like you, maybe it's the kind
Speaker 1: of thing that made sense in Tesla's mind, but the
Speaker 1: rest of us are probably not going to be on
Speaker 1: board with it. Kind of that classic Uni I think
Speaker 1: we've discussed this before, the the disconnect that that sometimes
Speaker 1: existed between NASA researchers and astronauts. Mary Roach goes into
Speaker 1: this in her book Packing for Mars. But you would
Speaker 1: have these, you know, very hardcore scientist um types who
Speaker 1: would say, look, all right, we're trying to figure out
Speaker 1: how you would do this mission to another planet. Well, uh,
Speaker 1: you know what if we made the walls out of
Speaker 1: edible material, what do we we come up? What came
Speaker 1: up with a way for the astronauts to reconsume fecal
Speaker 1: matter or something like that, and it would make sense
Speaker 1: to them, But if you brought it up to the
Speaker 1: more sort of test pilot um style astronauts of the day,
Speaker 1: they would say, yeah, we're not doing that. Or like
Speaker 1: early on they didn't think to plan for the idea
Speaker 1: that an astronaut might need to pee while in space.
Speaker 1: Yeah yeah, So like sometimes, as you can, you can
Speaker 1: miss the obvious things in trying to solve the bigger
Speaker 1: problems involved, right totally. I mean, being a genius in
Speaker 1: one sense doesn't necessarily guarantee that you that you have
Speaker 1: a thorough and practical mind in in every sense. I mean,
Speaker 1: we need to remind ourselves that a lot of great
Speaker 1: inventions don't always come from like scientific geniuses. Sometimes they
Speaker 1: just come from people who have hands on experience with
Speaker 1: a certain kind of work or technology. Yeah, where they say, hey,
Speaker 1: this thing is pretty cool. But if I turn this around, uh,
Speaker 1: if I replace this part with this part, then then
Speaker 1: I have a true invention. Yeah. Now, Tesla wasn't the
Speaker 1: only real, credible and even famous inventor to claim work
Speaker 1: on a death ray. In the nineteen thirties, the Italian
Speaker 1: inventor googli Elmo Marconi, who is known for his important
Speaker 1: work on long distance radio transmission and the invention of
Speaker 1: the wireless telegraph, claimed to be working on a war
Speaker 1: ray based on ultra short radio waves so I think
Speaker 1: basically means microwaves. So Marconi had previously also given public
Speaker 1: comments about how he thought technology in general, not necessarily weapons,
Speaker 1: could bring it into all wars, Like in nineteen twelve,
Speaker 1: he told a magazine that quote, the coming of the
Speaker 1: wireless era will make war impossible, because it will make
Speaker 1: war ridiculous. I think he was thinking, like wireless communications
Speaker 1: that enables rapid communication all over the place. Maybe, you know,
Speaker 1: maybe if everybody in the world can just talk to
Speaker 1: each other, we will stop having all this this fighting. Right. Oh,
Speaker 1: how naive. But it's also not clear that that's exactly
Speaker 1: what he meant, because I think he just generally had
Speaker 1: lots of enthusiasm for the wireless world as a whole.
Speaker 1: And this is a common thing at the time, especially
Speaker 1: among people who are enthusiastic about technology. There's an idea
Speaker 1: that a new technology will not just fix a particular
Speaker 1: problem or make a particular job easier, but that it
Speaker 1: will it will have a kind of utopian effect, will
Speaker 1: have a civilizing effect upon people, and will will generally
Speaker 1: bring out a better world. Yeah, and we've seen that
Speaker 1: with the Internet, for example. Oh man, do you remember
Speaker 1: the early Internet hype about how like, wow, if we
Speaker 1: can just get everybody talking to each other, things will
Speaker 1: be so great. Yeah. Yeah, And then yeah, let's just
Speaker 1: get everybody engaged in this conversation. And then you realize
Speaker 1: what happens when everyone is engaged in the conversation, and
Speaker 1: it's not just a select bubble of individuals. But it
Speaker 1: wasn't just Tesla, wasn't just Marconi, It wasn't just all
Speaker 1: of these con artists. We've talked about. I mean, there
Speaker 1: were there were tons of people in this period who
Speaker 1: hoped for a technology who would they would end all
Speaker 1: war or make war impossible. And I've been interested in
Speaker 1: this line of thinking for a while. I remember, long
Speaker 1: time ago, I did a guest episode of the podcast
Speaker 1: tech Stuff with our coworker Jonathan Strickland about the idea
Speaker 1: of people who thought different technologies would bring it into
Speaker 1: all war. Like I believe it was Bertilow, the French chemist,
Speaker 1: who thought, you know, well, once we can use chemistry
Speaker 1: to engineer abundance of resources around the world and engineer
Speaker 1: you know, abundant food and things like that out of
Speaker 1: out of base chemicals, then there will be no more
Speaker 1: war because there's just nothing to fight over. That's just
Speaker 1: one example. I mean, people constantly think that some new
Speaker 1: invention or technology is going to make all the fighting stop,
Speaker 1: and it's never happened so far, right, I mean you
Speaker 1: still I mean, you certainly saw this argument early on
Speaker 1: with atomic weapons, and you still see it, uh rear
Speaker 1: its head today where people making the argument that that
Speaker 1: the atomic arsenals make nations safer and make with the
Speaker 1: world safer because everyone's afraid to use them this sort
Speaker 1: of thing. Yeah, I mean it's hard to it's hard
Speaker 1: to know how much validity there is to a certain
Speaker 1: version of this because you can't, like, you know, run
Speaker 1: the counterfactual history. But yeah, some people would say, like,
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, though they are terrible, if they were ever used,
Speaker 1: actually have had a positive effect, because they might say, well, look,
Speaker 1: the United States and the Soviet Union never directly went
Speaker 1: to war with one another, and if there had, if
Speaker 1: there hadn't been these nuclear arsenals, they would have directly
Speaker 1: gone to war with each other. It's if they've ever
Speaker 1: been used, you're you're talking about active warfare between two
Speaker 1: armed opponents. Because of course we we did see the
Speaker 1: use of nuclear weapons that the close of the Second
Speaker 1: World War exactly right now, I'm talking about the United
Speaker 1: States and the Soviet Union against each other. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: And and of course we can't know if that's true.
Speaker 1: I mean, they might without these weapons, they might not
Speaker 1: have gone to war with each other, but it's certainly
Speaker 1: did not stop war bringing into war. I mean, all
Speaker 1: throughout the Cold War, even though the US and the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union were never directly in conflict with each other,
Speaker 1: there were tons of wars that these powers backed and
Speaker 1: armed and carried out against other nations around the world.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's the list is huge. Yeah. You know,
Speaker 1: this idea though, of the of atomic weapons being this
Speaker 1: kind of having this balancing effect. You you see that
Speaker 1: utilized in Frank Herbert's Dune. Uh, there's this whole layer
Speaker 1: to it where the different great houses, like the Tradees
Speaker 1: and the Harconans, they all have their own house atomic right,
Speaker 1: the family Jewels. Yeah, yeah, they are, and and it's
Speaker 1: part of the balance between all these houses, Like these
Speaker 1: houses are not going to wage open war against each other,
Speaker 1: but of course they end up waging all of these
Speaker 1: kind of uh you know, medieval um campaigns against each other,
Speaker 1: these wars of assassins and so forth. Yes, So while yeah,
Speaker 1: that that that's a great point of analogy. I mean,
Speaker 1: I don't know how to evaluate the claim that nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons prevented the US and the Soviet Union firm directly
Speaker 1: going to war with each other. I don't I don't
Speaker 1: know how to know if that's true or not. But
Speaker 1: it's certainly not true that more and more powerful weapons
Speaker 1: stop wars from happening. Wars are still happening all the time.
Speaker 1: And I also kind of like maybe maybe then you
Speaker 1: would say, well, the problem is that not everybody has
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons, right, like nuclear armed powers or more technological
Speaker 1: powers can wage wars against less technologically armed powers. Uh.
Speaker 1: So then you would have to say, well, maybe the
Speaker 1: way to solve that problem is for everybody to have
Speaker 1: nuclear weapons. That doesn't sound like a great idea either. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: that that is not an argument that that really convinces me.
Speaker 1: You kind of get into the similar area where it's like,
Speaker 1: well if it's just if if every place is just
Speaker 1: a wild West town where everyone has a six shooter,
Speaker 1: then you're not going to have shootouts. Uh you know
Speaker 1: that sort of argument. Um, you know you can, you
Speaker 1: can tease that apart for for smaller scale situations. But yeah,
Speaker 1: when you're talking about nation states, I'm I'm less convinced personally. Nevertheless,
Speaker 1: I mean people people do still show this strain of
Speaker 1: thinking that like technological superiority will eventually make fighting impossible.
Speaker 1: Like some people still do seem to think that way,
Speaker 1: And I wonder like would that ever be possible? Would
Speaker 1: it would that ever be true? Could you ever have
Speaker 1: a Even if you want to take the best scenario there,
Speaker 1: you're not actually talking about just like dominating the world
Speaker 1: and crushing all possible to sin. Let's say you're only
Speaker 1: talking about defensive weapons that would say protect your homeland
Speaker 1: from invasion or something. But I've bean but in the
Speaker 1: nuclear example, like all defensive nuclear weapons are offensive nuclear
Speaker 1: weapons exactly. It's the theory of of the only defenses
Speaker 1: retaliation is the threat of retaliation. And we saw this
Speaker 1: in the last episode where we talked about the idea
Speaker 1: of this came out of the bomber threat. The idea
Speaker 1: is the bomber always gets through. You can't stop the
Speaker 1: bomber planes from reaching your cities. The only thing that
Speaker 1: is a deterrent from to keep people from bombing you
Speaker 1: is the threat that if they bomb you, you'll bomb them, right,
Speaker 1: And of course there's a man we could we could
Speaker 1: really go down the rabbit hole with with with the
Speaker 1: discussing atomic weapons, and we may have to come back
Speaker 1: to them in the future. But you know, ultimately, with
Speaker 1: all these cases, you I think you kilds argue that
Speaker 1: these are all situations where the technological abilities of of
Speaker 1: of human conflict have certainly far outstripped the sort of
Speaker 1: conflicts that we evolved to engage in and have ultimately
Speaker 1: the mental capacity to engage in even the social capacity
Speaker 1: to engage in. Our our instincts are pretty good for
Speaker 1: thinking about fights that involve like teeth and hands. But yeah,
Speaker 1: throw a death ray in there, and it's a it's
Speaker 1: a different scenario. Yeah. So I mean, I I guess
Speaker 1: this is my personal opinion, but I would tend to think,
Speaker 1: looking at all of this history, that it's kind of
Speaker 1: folly to engage in this you know, new technological terror.
Speaker 1: This new weapon will finally bring about world peace. All Right,
Speaker 1: On that note, we're going to take one more break,
Speaker 1: and when we come back, we're going to get into
Speaker 1: the legacy and we're going to get into a little
Speaker 1: that science fiction that we talked about earlier. Alright, we're back. Now.
Speaker 1: There is one way that we've been talking about this
Speaker 1: this book by Fanning. Fanning points out that death ray
Speaker 1: research did come to a real and important technology to
Speaker 1: defend against air raids. The original reason that people kept
Speaker 1: talking about it. And here's the story. So Fanning writes
Speaker 1: about how in the midnight teen thirties, British authorities invited
Speaker 1: this guy named Robert A. Watson Watt, who was superintendent
Speaker 1: of the radio Research Station at Slough to do research
Speaker 1: on death rays to shore British shair defenses. Like we
Speaker 1: talked about, like governments frequently did show actual interest in
Speaker 1: death rays. It wasn't just popular hype. The governments were like, well,
Speaker 1: if somebody's got one, we want it. So we want
Speaker 1: to know if this can be done, and so they
Speaker 1: they asked Watson, want to see if there was any
Speaker 1: way of generating rays that could stop or destroy enemy aircraft.
Speaker 1: And so Watson, Watt and his assistant Arnold Skip Wilkins
Speaker 1: did some tests in their lab and they concluded, as
Speaker 1: others had in the past, that it was not practical
Speaker 1: to create such a ray because in order to operate
Speaker 1: at the appropriate distance to shoot planes out of the
Speaker 1: sky from a distance, it would require just an impot
Speaker 1: possible amount of energy. And they also mentioned and that
Speaker 1: this is in fact the same thing Tesla was complaining
Speaker 1: about once he adjusted his claim from the earlier death
Speaker 1: ray claim to the later particle beam idea. But then
Speaker 1: also uh these guys mentioned the idea that radio waves
Speaker 1: aimed at an aircraft might bounce back toward the transmitter,
Speaker 1: and this idea, of course helped form the basis of
Speaker 1: what would become radar, using radio waves to detect incoming
Speaker 1: enemy aircraft before they were overhead, allowing time to prepare
Speaker 1: defenses against the air raid. And so the death ray
Speaker 1: story proved doubly useful for the British here because Fanning
Speaker 1: points out that the British also allowed stories about fictitious
Speaker 1: government death ray projects to circulate, sort of as a
Speaker 1: cover to substitute for the very real defensive technology that
Speaker 1: they were developing. Like, if you let it be known
Speaker 1: that Britain is working on a death ray, it will
Speaker 1: help give the citizens comfort without revealing anything about the
Speaker 1: real new technology of defense that you're working on, which
Speaker 1: they didn't want falling into enemy hands, right, and then
Speaker 1: enemy agents they might they might be more inclined to realize, well,
Speaker 1: we have our own death ray projects, or we've we've
Speaker 1: talked to some of these these guys who are peddling it.
Speaker 1: We know there's nothing there, We know this is or
Speaker 1: we suspect this is a fool's Errand so it provides
Speaker 1: kind of a nice cover story for something that is
Speaker 1: uh an actual technology that's going to change the shape
Speaker 1: of war and potentially a decisive technology like more precise
Speaker 1: and more miniaturized radar. I think could easily be considered
Speaker 1: one of the technological advantages that helped the Allies win
Speaker 1: the war in Europe. And there's also a strange historical connection.
Speaker 1: So there's this British propaganda that says, yeah, we we've
Speaker 1: got a death ray, that's what we're working on, when
Speaker 1: really what they're working on is radar, which is far
Speaker 1: more useful and effective. There's another type of British propaganda
Speaker 1: to cover up the advancement of radar technology, which is
Speaker 1: related to the origin of the myth that carrots give
Speaker 1: people super ry sight. So like you've seen these old
Speaker 1: World War two era ads from Britain saying, you know,
Speaker 1: have have have supersight like an r AF pilot. They
Speaker 1: eat carrots every day. Now, it is true that actually
Speaker 1: carrots contain beta carotene, and beta carotene turns into vitamin
Speaker 1: A when it's digested in the body, and vitamin A
Speaker 1: is important for proper eye health. But it's not like
Speaker 1: eating a surfeit of carrots will give you extra powerful eyes.
Speaker 1: You just you need vitamin A from one source or another.
Speaker 1: Carrots are one of those sources. I have to admit
Speaker 1: that even though I've I've known this for ages, when
Speaker 1: I eat carrots, there's still a part of my brain
Speaker 1: that kind of pipes up and says, all right, eyes,
Speaker 1: here you go, this one's for you. And well that
Speaker 1: this also served a double function because one of the
Speaker 1: things was that, you know, during World War Two the
Speaker 1: British there there was food rationing. I mean a lot
Speaker 1: of things were not widely available, but carrots were one
Speaker 1: of the things that they had in spades. This was
Speaker 1: a staple of every background garden I'm guessing exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: your victory garden had carrots in it so people could
Speaker 1: eat is mitch. You know, they wanted people in Britain
Speaker 1: eating carrots to support the war effort instead of like
Speaker 1: using up precious sugar or something like that. This is
Speaker 1: why all the Beatrix Potter rabbits were considered enemies of
Speaker 1: the state at the time. I don't know, but so
Speaker 1: they want people eating carrots, and they also didn't want
Speaker 1: people to know about the advantage that RF pilots had
Speaker 1: due to radar, so the enemy would think, how are
Speaker 1: they doing this? It's carrots, It's the strategic carrot reserves
Speaker 1: that the British have at their disposal. I don't know
Speaker 1: if it worked on the enemy that way. I mean,
Speaker 1: that would be funny if they thought it did. But uh,
Speaker 1: but at least we at least worked at home. But
Speaker 1: now you know what carrots and death rays have in common.
Speaker 1: So here's a question. When did all of the death
Speaker 1: ray hype come to an end? Like we know at
Speaker 1: some point it's not like people ever completely stopped talking
Speaker 1: about death rays, but this hype that we saw in
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and thirties into some degree during World
Speaker 1: War Two. Uh, it was clearly not nearly at the
Speaker 1: same level by say the fifties and sixties, right, and
Speaker 1: certainly by the time I as a child in the
Speaker 1: eighties when I was reading my grandfather's Popular Mechanics and
Speaker 1: Popular science magazines, I I don't remember seeing anything about
Speaker 1: death rays like that was not and that's where you
Speaker 1: would see it, like that's those are the places where
Speaker 1: you would have seen like a popular obsession with this
Speaker 1: kind of pending technology. When with those magazines have been
Speaker 1: from Uh, they were they were current, he was currently okay,
Speaker 1: so they were all you know, nineteen eighties additions but
Speaker 1: but yeah, there was no talk of that. And then also, um,
Speaker 1: you know, I think I may have alluded to this
Speaker 1: in the last episode, but certainly you begin to see
Speaker 1: a fall off in the use of of of ray
Speaker 1: guns and death rays and science fiction too. You see
Speaker 1: sort of the return to to using bullets. You see
Speaker 1: you see that in like like Aliens. You see that.
Speaker 1: I believe in Blade Runner they do. They have more
Speaker 1: ballistic technology. He's got a gun that shoots like huge
Speaker 1: bullets are almost like rocket bullets. Or so it's like
Speaker 1: finally everyone was like, yeah, I'm kind of done with
Speaker 1: ray guns. Let's just get back to putting a big
Speaker 1: chunks of metal in people. Yeah. So ray gun fever
Speaker 1: never completely went away, but it definitely died down a
Speaker 1: lot by the middle of the twentieth century. And the
Speaker 1: question is why, I think A big answer here is
Speaker 1: World War Two. First of all, you could say, okay,
Speaker 1: now people are reading reports from the battlefield and it's like,
Speaker 1: where are all these death rays we've been hearing about.
Speaker 1: We've been hearing about death rays for decades now, and
Speaker 1: nobody's using them. There were there were a few news
Speaker 1: reports throughout the war that kept hinting at rumors of
Speaker 1: a German or Japanese secret weapon that many supposed to
Speaker 1: be a death ray, but there were just never any
Speaker 1: solid reports of one being used in the field. I
Speaker 1: think this clearly undercut public confidence in the idea of
Speaker 1: a death ray being a real thing. If they're real,
Speaker 1: why aren't why aren't the major powers using them? But
Speaker 1: that doesn't mean that during the World War Two era
Speaker 1: the major powers were not still interested in death rays.
Speaker 1: There was some research that continued to go on during
Speaker 1: the period. If possible, they wanted the edge there. There
Speaker 1: was a story that even like the Nazi Albert Spear
Speaker 1: talks about having this guy coming to him who's really
Speaker 1: interested in the Nazi government acquiring death rays but he
Speaker 1: but Spear just mocks him and says, okay, I'll make
Speaker 1: you commission or of death rays. Nazis generally not known
Speaker 1: for their their humorous quips. I guess not, but they
Speaker 1: That's that's a pretty solid burn. And of course it
Speaker 1: wasn't just some people in the German power structure, you know,
Speaker 1: the the the Allies, the Japanese. They remained interested in
Speaker 1: the idea of a death ray and carried out some
Speaker 1: research but it just never materialized. It was never practical,
Speaker 1: it would require too much energy, it didn't work at
Speaker 1: a great enough distance. That seemed to be the major
Speaker 1: problem was that what actual real physical death ray research
Speaker 1: did take place found that, yeah, you can use you know,
Speaker 1: you can use radiant energy of some kind to to
Speaker 1: cause damage to something, it just doesn't work at a
Speaker 1: great distance. And of course, another angle to all of
Speaker 1: this too is that certainly by the close of the war, uh,
Speaker 1: we saw the the awful potential of nuclear weapons. They
Speaker 1: had been demonstrated to horrific effects, and we're still living
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of of those demonstrations. We are still
Speaker 1: living in an age in which the threat of of
Speaker 1: their use continues to remain horror of modern life. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: I mean there was a new cutting edge, almost science
Speaker 1: fiction terror weapon to think about, and that was nuclear weapons.
Speaker 1: And yeah, I mean, once once you had atomic bombs
Speaker 1: actually being deployed, you can see how that would replace
Speaker 1: whatever kind of attention people might have been devoting to
Speaker 1: X ray or not X rays, to death rays beforehand.
Speaker 1: And you can see that in the in the fiction
Speaker 1: of the time too. What what was big in the
Speaker 1: science fiction and you know, popular films of the nineteen fifties.
Speaker 1: It was the atomic age monster movies. Now, I guess
Speaker 1: another thing we can point out is that sort of
Speaker 1: like directed in g weapons or ray based weapons remain
Speaker 1: in a way of physical possibility and there are actually
Speaker 1: used in some limited scenarios. You can build a lethal
Speaker 1: laser or X ray projector or something like that today,
Speaker 1: but when bullets and conventional explosives are so much cheaper
Speaker 1: and easier, they're generally the option that most militaries are
Speaker 1: going to go for. The remains sort of special cases
Speaker 1: where you might want some kind of ray weapon, but
Speaker 1: generally speaking they're just not super practical, and for those
Speaker 1: special cases, research has of course continued up until the
Speaker 1: present day. Yeah, I mean going back to testa for instance,
Speaker 1: It's worth noting that charge particle beam weapon experiments did
Speaker 1: take place in the United States and the Soviet Union
Speaker 1: during this Cold War. The U S Department of Defensive
Speaker 1: Strategic Defense Initiative Organization sponsored the Beam experiments aboard Rocket
Speaker 1: or Bear project in nine and an experimental prototype neutral
Speaker 1: neutral hydrogen beam weapon. Uh you know it was developed
Speaker 1: that they hoped might lead to a space weapon. Yea
Speaker 1: space weapons are a commonplace. You see the idea of
Speaker 1: of of beam weapons or directed energy weapons being talked
Speaker 1: about these days. And you know, we see other cases
Speaker 1: again to your point, lasers, acoustic weapons as well. But
Speaker 1: but these projects, they don't play a huge role in
Speaker 1: um in in the structure of any given military or
Speaker 1: defensive or offensive strategy. At most. You might see it
Speaker 1: with the acoustic weapons. You know, you might see them
Speaker 1: used to some effect as a as an instrument of
Speaker 1: subversion or terror. Yeah. Of course, if death rays have
Speaker 1: a true legacy, it's in science fiction. Yeah, so I
Speaker 1: figured this is probably the best time for us to
Speaker 1: talk about some of our favorite examples of the death
Speaker 1: ray or the ray gun. Um. You know, throughout the
Speaker 1: different science fiction installments, we can't cover all of them.
Speaker 1: We can't cover like the real all the real groundbreakers,
Speaker 1: but there are some fabulous ones to discuss. Oh it's
Speaker 1: um So. One of my favorite add movies is the
Speaker 1: nineteen seventy eight Star Wars rip off Star Crashes, starring
Speaker 1: Carolyn Monroe as Stella Star and it's got this like
Speaker 1: Louisiana accent robot. Yes, I believe there's a recent mystery
Speaker 1: science theater three thousand riff of this for anyone in
Speaker 1: resident checking it out. Actually haven't watched that yet, but
Speaker 1: I have watched the movie multiple times without any riffs whatsoever,
Speaker 1: because I want the pure experience. It's also got David Hasselhoff.
Speaker 1: It's got mar Joe Gortoner, who has a strange biography.
Speaker 1: He was like a child evangelist, like a tent revival
Speaker 1: preacher when he was a little kid, and then he
Speaker 1: grew up to try to be an actor, and so
Speaker 1: he's in this movie. And he's in my favorite scene
Speaker 1: in the movie where there's a bad guy who's shooting him,
Speaker 1: shooting him with a laser gun. Uh, and he says
Speaker 1: the bad guys says, no one can survive these deadly rays.
Speaker 1: And then mar Joe turns the rays back on the
Speaker 1: villain and says, these deadly rays will be your death.
Speaker 1: He's laser proof. That is That is good writing. Oh
Speaker 1: oh man. Some of my favorites, Um, there was did
Speaker 1: you ever see nineteen nine Teenagers from Outer Space? I
Speaker 1: don't recall if I've seen. Oh wait a minute, I
Speaker 1: think there's also an old mystery science theater of that,
Speaker 1: isn't there? There is? And then and then the scene
Speaker 1: that that I'm referencing here was also used in It
Speaker 1: came from Hollywood that you know, the classic mash up
Speaker 1: of of different classic Hollywood sci fi trailers and whatnot.
Speaker 1: But there's a scene where the the UFO lands like
Speaker 1: in the desert and a dog, a little dog is
Speaker 1: yapping at it, and the top of the UFO opens. Uh,
Speaker 1: spaceman peeks out and he blasts the dog with a
Speaker 1: death ray and the death and the dog just turns
Speaker 1: to two bones immediately. Oh yeah, it's a great little
Speaker 1: bit of you know, simple special effects because they just
Speaker 1: it's like there's a dog and then they cut to
Speaker 1: the skeleton standing and then collapsing. I I don't abide
Speaker 1: violence against dogs and film. It was completely painless though
Speaker 1: dog did not suffer um and was silence as Tesla
Speaker 1: would have wanted. I always loved the death rays that
Speaker 1: you see in the Rocky R Picture Show. Riff Raff
Speaker 1: and Magenta bust out some really cool trident death rays.
Speaker 1: At the end, Richard O'Brien is a death ray though
Speaker 1: he is he is um and uh he has that
Speaker 1: fabulous costume with the ponytail and uh yeah, I love
Speaker 1: the three pronged death ray one of my favorites. Um
Speaker 1: the phasers of Star Trek certainly come to mind as
Speaker 1: as just classic directed energy weapons essentially death rays, though
Speaker 1: they of course can be set to stun instead. We
Speaker 1: see blasters throughout the Star Wars movies, and lightsabers are
Speaker 1: ultimately an extension of the same idea. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: a solid death ray. Yeah, you know. I think that
Speaker 1: ray guns became and have remained popular in mass market
Speaker 1: sci fi media for one of the same reasons that
Speaker 1: they were popular in in reality during the death ray
Speaker 1: praise in the twenties and thirties, which is which is
Speaker 1: the idea that they were clean. You know, think of
Speaker 1: like the muddy, bloody, depressing, dirty, confusing horror of World
Speaker 1: War One soldiers just blasted to pieces by artillery and
Speaker 1: burned with mustard gas. Uh cities bombed people burning like
Speaker 1: the death ray is a way of making war and
Speaker 1: violence seem clean and hold you like there's not a
Speaker 1: lot of blood or you know what I mean. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: so many times, and I think oftentimes it's just because
Speaker 1: it's cheap. It's a great it's a great way to
Speaker 1: have sci fi violence in your your low budget feature
Speaker 1: is that just you shoot them with the death ray
Speaker 1: and they fall down. You don't even need the crazy
Speaker 1: bones effect exactly. I mean, remember the quote from that
Speaker 1: Tesla article where it says like an army of a
Speaker 1: million dead and not even a powerful microscope would reveal
Speaker 1: what catastrophe had caused the destruction. It just seems like
Speaker 1: there's no blood, that's just a vaporization, just gone. It's
Speaker 1: so sanitized in ways that, Like, I think back to
Speaker 1: watching Star Wars as a child, and I recently rewatched
Speaker 1: it for the first time and got probably a decade
Speaker 1: or more. I watched it with my my my six
Speaker 1: year old son, and they're blasting each other and they're
Speaker 1: presumably Stormtroopers are dying all over the place, but you
Speaker 1: don't really think about it. And and even that scene
Speaker 1: where an entire planet is destroyed by the Death Star's
Speaker 1: massive death ray, um, I as a kid, I never
Speaker 1: really thought about the fact that this was just an
Speaker 1: act of just pure genocide by the Empire. It was
Speaker 1: just like, oh, they just blew something up and you
Speaker 1: know it the planet and lays upset about it. But
Speaker 1: it did feel very sanitized. You could almost you could
Speaker 1: almost like sympathize with the empire on that with really
Speaker 1: stopping to think that, oh, they just killed so many
Speaker 1: innocent people. Yeah, well, in fiction, in film, like you're
Speaker 1: talking about it, because it's like this, it has the advantages,
Speaker 1: the twofold advantage of sort of getting around the sensors
Speaker 1: by not showing all the blood and guts. So it's
Speaker 1: just it makes violence less slimy and icky, but then
Speaker 1: also being cheaper, Like I think you were saying this
Speaker 1: a minute ago, like you don't need the effects of
Speaker 1: all that. So it's advantageous in films and fiction for
Speaker 1: that reason. But I think it's sort of similar why
Speaker 1: it was so appealing to people in the twenties and thirties.
Speaker 1: In reality you were like, I could have a weapon
Speaker 1: in my country that would allow me to feel safe
Speaker 1: and defended without forcing me to think about like all
Speaker 1: of the body parts and stuff that they would be
Speaker 1: left behind after that weapon does its business. It makes
Speaker 1: war seem clean. And this actually brings me back to
Speaker 1: what we talked about in our episode on the guillotine,
Speaker 1: Like the whole idea there was that maybe you know
Speaker 1: a machine for beheading people in a place where you've
Speaker 1: already got capital punishment. Uh. The idea behind the creation
Speaker 1: of the guillotine was that it would actually be more
Speaker 1: humane because it would make it a cleaner, more mechanical,
Speaker 1: less uh, you know, less prone to error, and less
Speaker 1: bloody and nasty process. But do you actually is it
Speaker 1: is that necessarily a good thing to sanitize the process?
Speaker 1: Does that actually make it easier to do violence when
Speaker 1: it's less when it's less chaotic and gory. Yeah, it
Speaker 1: perhaps it invites us to lose sight of the true
Speaker 1: horrors involved in it. We get that, we get that
Speaker 1: sanitized G I. Joe cartoon version of warfare, which doesn't
Speaker 1: seem all that horrifying, seems fun. They were just watching
Speaker 1: all these different toys fly around, and every time a
Speaker 1: plane explodes, a parachute is deployed. Uh, and people rarely
Speaker 1: ever die. Yeah, And you know what I think, I'm
Speaker 1: with the film director Paul Verhoeven on the idea that
Speaker 1: gratuitous violence is not when a movie has lots of
Speaker 1: blood and guts and gore. Gratuitous violence is when there's
Speaker 1: tons of violence and you see no effects and feel nothing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: That this was I remember seeing a similar argument made
Speaker 1: about Conan the Barbarian, the idea that yes, there's violence
Speaker 1: in the film, but but and and it's it's it's
Speaker 1: some of it's very rough to watch, but that arguable
Speaker 1: it all means something like it doesn't get into that
Speaker 1: gratuitous area there. Uh. That being said, I'm a little
Speaker 1: over traditional ballistics. I think in science fiction I'd like
Speaker 1: to see more of a return to ray guns and
Speaker 1: death rays. Yeah. I don't know, It's just it seems
Speaker 1: like I've I've I've watched a lot of people get
Speaker 1: shot in science fiction over the years, and I'm ready
Speaker 1: for more ray guns, I think, to take it down
Speaker 1: a notch. Hollywood producers, are you listening accommodate Robert's desires here? Yeah,
Speaker 1: give us some good ray guns, or you could go
Speaker 1: the route of Warren Ellis in the comics series trans Metropolitan.
Speaker 1: I believe there's a ray gun that causes intestinal discomfort.
Speaker 1: It just makes you poop yourself. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: So when we could just see that in more science
Speaker 1: fiction installments, Robert, this exploration of death rays has proven
Speaker 1: far more rich and deep and interesting than I even
Speaker 1: imagined it would be. And I had high hopes. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what it illuminates in a lot of of actual technologies
Speaker 1: and just what was going on in the the science
Speaker 1: sentific zeitgeist at the time. So yeah, this was the fun.
Speaker 1: This was a fun too parter and it also touched
Speaker 1: on areas that we may return to in the future
Speaker 1: in future episodes of Invention. And if you want to
Speaker 1: explore past episodes of Invention, head on over to invention
Speaker 1: pod dot com. That is the homepage for the series.
Speaker 1: That's where we'll find all the episodes, as well as
Speaker 1: links out to some of the social channels where you
Speaker 1: will find us. If you want to discuss this episode
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Speaker 1: to do so. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
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