Speaker 1: This death beam will operate silently but effectively a distances
Speaker 1: as far as a telescope could see an object on
Speaker 1: the ground, and as far as the curvature of the
Speaker 1: Earth would permit it. It will be invisible, and we'll
Speaker 1: leave no marks behind it beyond its evidence of destruction.
Speaker 1: An army of one million dead annihilated in an instant
Speaker 1: would not reveal, even under the most powerful microscope, just
Speaker 1: what catastrophe had caused its destruction. Welcome to Invention. My
Speaker 1: name is Robert lamp and I'm Joe McCormick, and today
Speaker 1: we are going to be talking about death rays. Now
Speaker 1: on this show, we we've talked about a lot of
Speaker 1: very real, in some cases very mundane yet interesting inventions,
Speaker 1: things like chopsticks or less mundane things like the X
Speaker 1: ray machine. But today we wanted to talk about an
Speaker 1: invention that sort of exists throughout its entire lifetime at
Speaker 1: the crossroads of myth and legend and reality. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is a curious one. This is This is perhaps our
Speaker 1: first topic where we cannot point at the thing and
Speaker 1: say here it is, here is the here's the invention.
Speaker 1: Let us explore its history. Now we all know today
Speaker 1: I mean, we are at a point where maybe we
Speaker 1: do risk the topic becoming somewhat mundane because everybody knows
Speaker 1: about lasers now, you know, this is the twenty one century.
Speaker 1: Laser research is going on all the time. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: and certainly as well explore a little bit there. There
Speaker 1: have been large scale military projects that have looked at
Speaker 1: the use of of particle and beam and laser technology
Speaker 1: to uh to inflict damage too. But but we have
Speaker 1: not reached the point of the classic sci fi death ray.
Speaker 1: We haven't reached the point where a a a beam
Speaker 1: based weapon is targeting a city or shooting you know,
Speaker 1: an airplane out of the sky, or being you know,
Speaker 1: used in bank robberies by high tech bandits, that sort
Speaker 1: of thing, at least not in a large scale And
Speaker 1: there might be some very good reasons for that, not
Speaker 1: just that like we don't have the technology to do it,
Speaker 1: but maybe because you know, they are easier ways to
Speaker 1: accomplish the same goal. But yeah, so we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about death rays. And this turned out, I think
Speaker 1: to be a much more interesting and culturally relevant topic
Speaker 1: than I would have expected. Because I'm gonna startup positing
Speaker 1: something essentially that what people have in mind when they
Speaker 1: talk about a death ray. What we often have in
Speaker 1: mind is like a directed energy weapon of some kind,
Speaker 1: you know, something that shoots a beam of electromagnetic radiation
Speaker 1: or some other kind of directed energy at a target
Speaker 1: to cause it damage or disable it somehow. Uh, I
Speaker 1: would pose it that. Essentially, this idea grows out of
Speaker 1: the concept to a magic Wand that's funny because at
Speaker 1: the same time, I feel like the sci fi vision
Speaker 1: of the blaster and the phaser and these various weapons
Speaker 1: they end up informing the way that magic wands are
Speaker 1: utilized in the Harry Potter films, especially the latter the
Speaker 1: latter films, where where they're having these large scale wand
Speaker 1: battles between the forces of good and the forces of evil,
Speaker 1: and it's you know, it's it's wonderful. But if you
Speaker 1: if you look at it, you can you can easily
Speaker 1: see this is essentially a laser battle. This These are blasters. Yeah,
Speaker 1: And if you go back into mythology, they're all kinds
Speaker 1: of concepts of like a weapon that can kill at
Speaker 1: a distance without a projectile, right, that's essentially what we're
Speaker 1: talking about. You can hit somebody from far away without
Speaker 1: actually throwing anything, right, Yeah, so some of the classic examples,
Speaker 1: and certainly we can't cover them all here, but you
Speaker 1: can think of say the Medusa the gorgon's gaze, right,
Speaker 1: or or or that of the mythic basilisk, the idea
Speaker 1: that it can kill or petro fy uh, anybody who
Speaker 1: looks upon it. It's almost the idea of a visible
Speaker 1: light death ray, like like a visible light frequency image
Speaker 1: that could kill you or harm you. Right. Of course,
Speaker 1: we always have to remember that the sun is the
Speaker 1: original death ray, right, it just works that it usually
Speaker 1: works at a slower pace. But all these are kind
Speaker 1: of they're getting into the idea of either a visible
Speaker 1: beam or very often unseen energy unseen death that is projected. Now,
Speaker 1: of course, fire breathing monsters are common to all kinds
Speaker 1: of fiction, but I would almost say, could you say
Speaker 1: that actually a fire breathing dragon is given it's it's
Speaker 1: a more conventional projectile because fire is like, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a chemical reaction of matter. It's heated gas and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. So if you're breathing fire on something,
Speaker 1: it's that's sort of a kind of projectile. It was
Speaker 1: you know, even if it's not scientifically understood by by
Speaker 1: by ancient people's like fire is. I mean, it's such
Speaker 1: a part of human life, right, it's it's, it's, it's,
Speaker 1: it's it's not this this mysterious property that we see
Speaker 1: in these these in these other myths were discussing and
Speaker 1: in the sci fi vision of the of the blaster
Speaker 1: or the death ray. Now, in a recent episode of
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we devoted two episodes to
Speaker 1: the Ark of the Covenant and its alleged powers of destruction. Now,
Speaker 1: I can't remember, did anybody ever suggest that the arc
Speaker 1: like shot laser beams or death rays. Um, well, Steven
Speaker 1: Spielberg and George Lucas did, because that's that's where you
Speaker 1: get that, That's where I'm getting that. But but certainly
Speaker 1: in some of the myths, you know, as we just
Speaker 1: floored in that episode, something seems to be emitted by
Speaker 1: the arc, And I get I didn't we don't. Don't
Speaker 1: think we ran across anybody saying that there were rays
Speaker 1: of death emitted from the ARC, but you know, you
Speaker 1: could make that argument, I guess now. I think I
Speaker 1: recalled that the main issues discussed in like the legends
Speaker 1: that appear in the Bible, are like fire coming out
Speaker 1: of it at people, or a just inflicting medical misery
Speaker 1: on people with plagues of m rods and mice. Now,
Speaker 1: one of my favorite tales of some sort of deadly
Speaker 1: beam uh actually comes to us from Irish mythology. I
Speaker 1: remember reading about this one as as a kid and
Speaker 1: just being blown away by it. I tell me, well,
Speaker 1: it's the story of the Famorian king Balor. He had
Speaker 1: but a single eye in the center of his head,
Speaker 1: and it's just a single glance from this I would
Speaker 1: destroy any mortal. And he gained this power by by
Speaker 1: peering into a druid's cauldron as a child. Now, even
Speaker 1: as a child who apparently only had one eye, but
Speaker 1: by gazing into the cauldron, all of the venomous vapor
Speaker 1: and the druids cauldron infected his eye and caused it
Speaker 1: to grow and grow in its power. Now, fortunately for
Speaker 1: the mortal world, his eyelid grew so large that eventually
Speaker 1: four men had to raise it up by the use
Speaker 1: of a cross beam in order to deploy his deadly
Speaker 1: gaze in battle. So he was like like a walking
Speaker 1: piece of of like like a cannon, you know, like
Speaker 1: he has to be I like to imagine he has
Speaker 1: to be kind of rolled out on a cart, and
Speaker 1: then people have to raise up the eyebrow and then
Speaker 1: anything within range just dies instantly. This sounds like the
Speaker 1: actual inspiration for Cyclops and the X Men. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: it's basically Cyclops, except I don't know that there's an actual,
Speaker 1: like visible beam that comes out right. So there's a
Speaker 1: there's a fabulous tale of how the the hero lugged
Speaker 1: the long handed who actually is lugged the long hand? Yeah,
Speaker 1: he's got long hands. He's actually Balor, his own grandson,
Speaker 1: who's prophesies to one day slay his grandfather. So he
Speaker 1: has to go up against Balor. Of course it's faded,
Speaker 1: but he does so by first of all staying out
Speaker 1: of the eyes range until the eyelid becomes so wary
Speaker 1: that it just has to close, and then he moves
Speaker 1: in and he waits till the split second when Bowler's
Speaker 1: i is open just enough for him to send a
Speaker 1: stone through with his slingshot, but not wide enough off
Speaker 1: that the full awful power of the gaze is unleashed,
Speaker 1: and so he lets fly the stone from his sling shot,
Speaker 1: and he sends it through the eye, back through Balor's
Speaker 1: brain out the back of his head, and such is
Speaker 1: the force of this, uh the sling shot missile that
Speaker 1: it then kills twenty seven warriors standing behind Balor. Going
Speaker 1: back to the Indiana Jones analogy, it's like when he
Speaker 1: uses that German pistol and it shoots through like four
Speaker 1: nazis exactly. Yeah, it's it's the same scenario. So it
Speaker 1: kills Balor, takes out the eye soldiers lined up behind him.
Speaker 1: I thought you were going to say that Lug the
Speaker 1: Longhanded was the first hero of mythology to defeat the
Speaker 1: monster by using the technology of pepper spray. Well, you know,
Speaker 1: he's got that big lid, so I guess he's kind
Speaker 1: of protected from it, right, But that would keep it closed, right,
Speaker 1: So you pepper spray Balor and then he tears up.
Speaker 1: He can't open his eye to look at you with
Speaker 1: the killer with the death rays, so you're you know,
Speaker 1: you can basically have free rain. Well, I guess it
Speaker 1: comes down to to range, though, what has greater range
Speaker 1: a slingshot or pepper spray. I think the slingshot probably
Speaker 1: gave him the advantage because remember that's a good point.
Speaker 1: He has to stay out of range, and then he
Speaker 1: has to he has to rush up, and he only
Speaker 1: has that split second to get the stone through before
Speaker 1: the the eye is open all the way and then
Speaker 1: he's toast. Now, another form of ancient death ray that's
Speaker 1: often been reported is uh I would say again, at
Speaker 1: the crossroads. The ones we've been talking about so far
Speaker 1: clearly myth. You know, these are obviously myth and legend.
Speaker 1: The next one is more at this crossroads of of
Speaker 1: legend and reality. We don't know to what extent this
Speaker 1: story is true, but it has been reported as if
Speaker 1: it were true. And this is the story of the
Speaker 1: death ray of our Coimedes. That's right. Archimedes refresher for
Speaker 1: everyone who was a Greek poly math who lived in
Speaker 1: the city state of Syracuse. And he was of course
Speaker 1: an inventor as well. If you're a Greek poly math,
Speaker 1: you're you're probably inventing stuff. He's credited with all kinds
Speaker 1: of interesting discoveries like the water screw, you know, an
Speaker 1: efficient method for raising water by turning a screw through
Speaker 1: a pipe. Right, And then he's also credited with Archimedes principle.
Speaker 1: This is from, for instance, on floating bodies. From any
Speaker 1: object wholly or partially immersed in a fluid is buoyed
Speaker 1: up by the force equal to the weight of the
Speaker 1: fluid displaced by the object. The old story, of course,
Speaker 1: is that he was taking a bath and then when
Speaker 1: he realizes what's happening, how he's displacing the water, he
Speaker 1: jumps out of the bath and yells, what was it
Speaker 1: Eureka's castle? Eureka. Uh yeah, that's where we get the
Speaker 1: word Eureka. Does that phrase actually mean something? I'm sure
Speaker 1: it does. You know, I've never actually looked into it. Oh,
Speaker 1: I just looked it up. It means I found it
Speaker 1: little disappointing. I I always just think of Eureka Alerts,
Speaker 1: which is the website that distributes press release has done
Speaker 1: upcoming science papers. Yeah, which perhaps Archimedes had access to somehow.
Speaker 1: That's that's the true Maria's machine. Through his time machine,
Speaker 1: he was able to access Eureka Alerts. And boy was
Speaker 1: he ever breaking embargo on this release is Antellia by
Speaker 1: thousands of years? Uh so, yeah, so we know that
Speaker 1: Archimedes he was He wrote on geometry and mathematics, and
Speaker 1: you know these kind of principles. But but let's talk
Speaker 1: about his his supposed technological creations, right. Yeah, So he's
Speaker 1: he's lives in Syracuse, again, the Greek city state, and
Speaker 1: of course he was called upon to build weapons from
Speaker 1: time to time, so he designed catapults. He said to
Speaker 1: have created the claw of Archimedes, which would allegedly grab
Speaker 1: warships out of the water and lift them up, kind
Speaker 1: of a war crane. I think, I think this is
Speaker 1: also in dispute whether that actually happened, right, yeah, but
Speaker 1: if it did, it would it would essentially be like
Speaker 1: the claw machine at the you know, at the at
Speaker 1: the the the arcade that grabs the stuffed animals, except
Speaker 1: he would be using it to grab ships during a siege. Yeah.
Speaker 1: But so we get to this idea of the death
Speaker 1: ray that Archimedes supposedly built. It's not again known whether
Speaker 1: he really built such a thing or even if it
Speaker 1: would have been possible with the material conditions that our
Speaker 1: committees would have been working with. But some ancient chroniclers
Speaker 1: report that during the Siege of Syracuse, our committees burned
Speaker 1: enemy ships in the water, and that you did this
Speaker 1: with the use of some kind of glass or mirror. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this would have been to twelve BC. And uh. The
Speaker 1: weird thing, of course is that nobody was immediately writing
Speaker 1: about or at least those writings haven't survived. We mainly
Speaker 1: know about it from the likes of Galen writing about
Speaker 1: it three and fifty years afterwards. And yeah, there's absolutely
Speaker 1: no certainty that this is anything other than a story.
Speaker 1: It's often dismissed as myth, but numerous attempts have been
Speaker 1: made to produce this sort of result via mirrors, looking
Speaker 1: into the idea, well, could you do it? Could you
Speaker 1: get enough mirrors? Could you use them to redirect and
Speaker 1: focus the rays of the sun and with such intensity
Speaker 1: that you could, uh, you could set a ship ablaze.
Speaker 1: It would essentially be the magnifying glass on the ant effect,
Speaker 1: except it would use tons of of polished metal imp
Speaker 1: elements or mirrors of some kind of reflective glass to
Speaker 1: shine the sunlight back onto a to a ship in
Speaker 1: a very focused way, maybe involving hundreds of these things.
Speaker 1: And there have been, like you said, a lot of
Speaker 1: attempts to try to do this. That there was like
Speaker 1: a MythBusters episode about it, and yeah, I think they
Speaker 1: tried it like three different times and they failed to
Speaker 1: produce results, but other attempts have been more successful. There
Speaker 1: was a two thousand five in my tea experiment that
Speaker 1: used a hundred and twenty seven mirrors to position an
Speaker 1: X on a wooden target ship, a ship that was
Speaker 1: we should point out was not in the water, but
Speaker 1: it was just like setting out a parking lot or something.
Speaker 1: There's a prop ship. Yeah. They found that they used
Speaker 1: ten minutes to aim the mirrors, resulting in almost immediate smoke,
Speaker 1: and then via continuous adjustment of me of the mirrors
Speaker 1: to refine focus, they managed to produce smoke and fire,
Speaker 1: so they concluded that such a method was at least feasible. Now,
Speaker 1: there was an earlier experiment from seventy three, a Greek experiment.
Speaker 1: They use seventy different mirrors, each one about five by
Speaker 1: three feet, and they use them in the hands of
Speaker 1: soldiers to concentrate the beams of light to set a
Speaker 1: floating rowboat ablaze, this opposed to a stationary test boat
Speaker 1: as in that in my t experiment. And this of
Speaker 1: course is key because you have you have to concentrate,
Speaker 1: you have to concentrate your sunlight on that object. And
Speaker 1: even during calm weather, a ship is going to be bobbing. Now,
Speaker 1: another thing is to consider the distance of a ship
Speaker 1: that's going to be bobbing in the water, because the
Speaker 1: farther away it is, the harder it's going to be
Speaker 1: to focus all your mirrors in the same place. I mean,
Speaker 1: imagine like trying to use a huge magnifying glass on
Speaker 1: an ant from like hundreds of feet away. Yeah. Now,
Speaker 1: in the writings about Archimedes death ray, generally were they
Speaker 1: were attributed to to being within bow and arrow range,
Speaker 1: and in ancient Greece that would be somewhere between two
Speaker 1: hundred to a thousand feet or sixty point nine eights. Now,
Speaker 1: if you think about that, then you might have to wonder, like, well,
Speaker 1: wait a minute, if they were trying to set ships
Speaker 1: on fire, why didn't they just like shoot flaming arrows? Yeah,
Speaker 1: this is Yeah, there are a number of problems with this.
Speaker 1: So there's the focusing, there's the fact that the ship
Speaker 1: is bobbing. There's there's the fact that nobody's writing about
Speaker 1: the success of this thing. I think back to our
Speaker 1: stuff to Blow your Mind episode on Greek fire, which
Speaker 1: certainly made an impression was a terror weapon was was
Speaker 1: a state secret and was effective, and people people spoke
Speaker 1: of it in horror, but not so with the Death Ray.
Speaker 1: People were not talking about it to like three fifty
Speaker 1: years after the fact that we know of. My take
Speaker 1: on this, based on what I've been reading, is that
Speaker 1: this sounds exactly like the kind of thing that somebody
Speaker 1: like our comedes might have at least tried to do
Speaker 1: during a long siege. There's a lot of setting around,
Speaker 1: there's probably a lot you imagine a mind like that
Speaker 1: of our comedies. He's probably thinking, well, what can we do?
Speaker 1: Could we you know, we could shoot some more arrows,
Speaker 1: we could fire up the catapult again, what if I
Speaker 1: could focus the rays of the sun. That's interesting, So
Speaker 1: like you could recast this not as a defensive tactic,
Speaker 1: but as an experiment. Had the opportunity to try it out,
Speaker 1: So why not try it right? And then during a siege,
Speaker 1: you know, hopefully he does catch the enemy ships on fire,
Speaker 1: you know, and I can imagine that that the military
Speaker 1: would say, oh, sure, yeah, to have to take as
Speaker 1: many soldiers as you want. They're just setting around waiting
Speaker 1: for something to happen. Anyway, and if you can set
Speaker 1: the Roman ships on fire, go for it. I guess
Speaker 1: if this did happen in any form at all, we
Speaker 1: don't know how many attempts it took for it to
Speaker 1: be successful, right, you know. I mean, maybe it's a
Speaker 1: situation where hey produced a little smoke and then they
Speaker 1: figured it out. Maybe they actually caught a ship on fire.
Speaker 1: But again, it seems like if it had really been effective,
Speaker 1: it would have become a standard weapon of war, and
Speaker 1: it did not. Yeah, and now this concept is basically
Speaker 1: in the bullpark of what is actually meant when people
Speaker 1: talk about modern technology magical visions of death rays, right,
Speaker 1: it's some kind of beam or directed energy weapon that
Speaker 1: causes physical damage or disables machines at a distance. Now,
Speaker 1: machines can't die, though, so why aren't we still kind
Speaker 1: of a death ray? It just sounds sexier than um,
Speaker 1: what uh machine malfunction ray. I want to be very clear,
Speaker 1: I did not decide to call these things death rays.
Speaker 1: Death ray is a term of art in the death
Speaker 1: ray industry and the death ray marketing industry, and you
Speaker 1: will find all throughout history that these items are in
Speaker 1: fact marketed in the press as death rays. So that's
Speaker 1: don't put that on me. All right, Well, let's get
Speaker 1: into the death rays. We we've talked about what came before.
Speaker 1: We've talked about the myth and at least half mythological
Speaker 1: stories of early death rays. Uh, certainly laying the groundwork
Speaker 1: for the idea. But at what point, then do we
Speaker 1: see something new in the pursuit of the death ray? Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, one way of asking that question is where
Speaker 1: does the desire for a death ray come from? Like,
Speaker 1: so we're going to be discussing how newspaper articles and
Speaker 1: con artists and inventors were constantly gabbing about death rays
Speaker 1: from say, the late eighteen hundreds until World War two roughly,
Speaker 1: especially at the period between the two world wars, like
Speaker 1: the nineteen twenties and thirties, that was like death ray
Speaker 1: fever hot zone. But didn't we already have enough guns
Speaker 1: and bombs and weapons to satisfy us, Like there were
Speaker 1: plenty of means available to cause destruction, to destroy people
Speaker 1: and vehicles, Like why were people so obsessed with this
Speaker 1: idea of a death ray? And so I think we
Speaker 1: should try to explore that a little bit, and that
Speaker 1: might give us a window into what's going on when
Speaker 1: we discussed these these actual reports of what inventors were claiming. Well,
Speaker 1: some of the answers we're gonna get into are definitely
Speaker 1: more intriguing than this one. But the one of the
Speaker 1: obvious answers that comes to mind is humans cannot create,
Speaker 1: cannot discover a new technology or develop a new technolo
Speaker 1: oology without thinking about ways to utilize it in war.
Speaker 1: That's true, so that it's just inevitable to a certain extent.
Speaker 1: We're discovering waves, and then it's the question is how
Speaker 1: can we start killing people with these ways, with these rays. Yeah,
Speaker 1: around the turn of the twentieth century, like in the
Speaker 1: eight nineties we had the discovery of X rays, people
Speaker 1: were discovering all different kinds of ways for energy to
Speaker 1: propagate wirelessly across distance. And Yeah, of course, the more
Speaker 1: we knew about that, it had that sexiness of being
Speaker 1: a cutting edge scientific discovery. Of course, people were thinking like,
Speaker 1: how can I use this for war? How can we
Speaker 1: get the international military edge by using what we now
Speaker 1: know about wireless energy transmission? Yeah, and then later on
Speaker 1: during the Cold War, we we we also see that
Speaker 1: the same sort of energy going into things that totally
Speaker 1: don't shake out, like the idea of of remote viewing
Speaker 1: and various psychic phenomena. Exactly. Yeah, we we've discussed on
Speaker 1: stuff to blow your mind before. How uh you know,
Speaker 1: I don't put any stock in the idea of psychic
Speaker 1: powers as a reality, but psychic research absolutely did take
Speaker 1: place during the Cold War, definitely on on the United
Speaker 1: States side, Like we know about the US government funded
Speaker 1: psychic research projects. Yeah, the idea being if there's something there,
Speaker 1: then we want to know about it because that we
Speaker 1: because the enemy is going to look into it as well.
Speaker 1: And you do see a similar energy in the pursuit
Speaker 1: of the death ray. Absolutely. So here's one thing you
Speaker 1: might assume. You know that there were all these articles
Speaker 1: about scientists claiming to have invented a death ray from say,
Speaker 1: you know, the late eighteen hundreds and really picking up
Speaker 1: after World War One, going through the twenties and thirties.
Speaker 1: What what might have caused that? You might think, Oh,
Speaker 1: the rise of science fiction. Yeah, like that. That seems
Speaker 1: like it would be an obvious answer because we we
Speaker 1: do see some of that when it comes to spade
Speaker 1: a space exploration. We see so many of the advances
Speaker 1: in rockets ran rocketry during the twentieth century are created
Speaker 1: by individuals who were inspired by science fiction. Yeah, so
Speaker 1: that is a totally natural thing to assume might be
Speaker 1: going on with death rays. But I want to mention
Speaker 1: a book that I've been reading that was actually I'd
Speaker 1: say this is our our best and main source in
Speaker 1: this episode as a book called death Rays and the
Speaker 1: Popular Media eighteen seventy six to nineteen thirty nine, a
Speaker 1: study of directed energy weapons in fact, fiction, and film
Speaker 1: by William J. Fanning Jr. McFarland Press from and this
Speaker 1: book is really interesting. It explores the relationship between sort
Speaker 1: of popular culture representations of death rays and death rays
Speaker 1: as existing or as people claim to exist or claim
Speaker 1: to be working on in the real world, and he
Speaker 1: makes a very compelling case that the relationship goes exactly
Speaker 1: the opposite way. So you've got this period of science
Speaker 1: fiction in the nineteen twenties and thirties known as the
Speaker 1: ray gun era of science fiction. Ray guns are everywhere,
Speaker 1: But he says, in fact, it's not that the newspapers
Speaker 1: were pulling all this ray gun hype from sci fi,
Speaker 1: but the fictional stories were pulling the ray gun hype
Speaker 1: from reality from the newspapers. And that's crazy. I just
Speaker 1: always assumed it to be the opposite, as as s
Speaker 1: later like there's a there's a cheapness to the ray
Speaker 1: gun effect, especially in these old cereals. Well you just think,
Speaker 1: well that that just it's a perfect you know, cheap
Speaker 1: fictionalized weapon because you don't have to you don't have
Speaker 1: to worry about there the fact that it doesn't look
Speaker 1: like there was a gun shot. You don't have to
Speaker 1: even worry about a fancy beam effect or anything. You
Speaker 1: don't have to actually discharge a weapon on stage or
Speaker 1: on set. You just go pu pu, and you're good.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's brilliantly convenient for all kinds of reasons,
Speaker 1: for you know, sensorious reasons having to do with not
Speaker 1: wanting to see blood and all that, and for cheapness reasons.
Speaker 1: It's just incredibly useful if you're trying to be an
Speaker 1: economical creator of science fiction. But yeah, there is this
Speaker 1: other direction in the relationship where it seems that a
Speaker 1: lot of this sci fi is it's kind of like
Speaker 1: how you know, a lot of there's that sort of
Speaker 1: mild sci fi, the sci fi that you might see
Speaker 1: in like military thriller movies that are not like super
Speaker 1: they don't have time machines and stuff like that. They've
Speaker 1: just got like slightly more advanced than we actually have
Speaker 1: today weapons and stuff. It's like when there was there
Speaker 1: were talk of railguns, and then then you have that
Speaker 1: Arnold Swartzenegger movie what was it Eracer I think where
Speaker 1: it prominently features railguns. I never saw that, Oh what
Speaker 1: has great railguns in it? Yeah? And Arnold Schwarzenegger, is
Speaker 1: that the one I heard of where he at one
Speaker 1: point shoots an alligator and says, your luggage. I literally
Speaker 1: only remember the railguns the only thing I remember from
Speaker 1: that movie, but it was but it definitely felt like
Speaker 1: a similar scenario if only railguns had caught on more.
Speaker 1: I think to a certain extent they did because you
Speaker 1: started seeing them in video games everywhere around that time
Speaker 1: as well. Robert I could talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger all day.
Speaker 1: We got to get back to the ray gun era.
Speaker 1: So the ray gun era, uh yeah. So there's this
Speaker 1: idea that for some reason everybody in the press is
Speaker 1: really excited about the idea of of death rays, and
Speaker 1: there's a there's a really interesting cultural and political reason
Speaker 1: that this kind of thing was popular in the nineteen
Speaker 1: twenties and thirties, and it had to do with the
Speaker 1: idea of the next war. Now we've you know, explored
Speaker 1: many times how there was a way in which the
Speaker 1: First World War was a kind of new and unique terror.
Speaker 1: There had always been horrible wars and were you know,
Speaker 1: war always kills, war is always awful. But the First
Speaker 1: World War, mainly, I think for technological reasons, was was
Speaker 1: shocking in the kind of terror it presented. That's right.
Speaker 1: It was a war in which we had these dehumanizing machines,
Speaker 1: We had these these these terrifying chemicals, these chemical agents
Speaker 1: that were deployed. We had bombs falling from the sky.
Speaker 1: It was it was just technology used to just terror
Speaker 1: humanity apart. Yeah, And and the biggest changes I think
Speaker 1: that we're lingering in the in the consciousness of people
Speaker 1: who survived the First World War where knowledge of the
Speaker 1: idea of of air bombing, air power as a weapon
Speaker 1: of war, which when you think about it now, that
Speaker 1: seems like, you know, we all grew up with the
Speaker 1: idea of an air force being part of a nation's military,
Speaker 1: but this was new at the time, you know, having
Speaker 1: an air force that could fly planes over your city
Speaker 1: and bomb the civilians in the city. It completely reversed
Speaker 1: the dynamics of war. Now it's saying, Okay, the civilians
Speaker 1: back home are now on the front lines. Like air
Speaker 1: power introduced an entirely new theater of combat, entirely new
Speaker 1: layer of strategy, and and yeah, that allowed just anybody
Speaker 1: living in any given city to suddenly be a casualty
Speaker 1: and casualty in that war with without there being a
Speaker 1: full invasion. Right, people way back home could think, I
Speaker 1: don't have to go to war to be in danger.
Speaker 1: I could be in my house and someone could drop
Speaker 1: a mustard gas attack on me and my family while
Speaker 1: we're way back home. Uh. And it's because you're basically
Speaker 1: always within reach of the bomber. The comer can go anywhere.
Speaker 1: So Fanning points out that books and articles at the time,
Speaker 1: in the twenties and thirties just would constantly work over
Speaker 1: these lurid imaginings of what this horrible next war would
Speaker 1: be like. And it involved these new elements that we,
Speaker 1: you know, that we had put to use in the
Speaker 1: First World War, but just at a much more apocalyptic scale.
Speaker 1: So terror bombings of civilian cities, killing millions with high explosive,
Speaker 1: with incendiary bombs, with poison gas. Uh. This is a
Speaker 1: horrible thing to imagine, is you know, just right around
Speaker 1: the corner coming to your city or the city next door. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I remember seeing an old holiday cartoon actually that depicted
Speaker 1: talking animals picking up after the last two soldiers shoot
Speaker 1: each other in in in in this great war, this
Speaker 1: next war like this, you know across it's like an
Speaker 1: apocalyptic trench landscape with two gas masked individuals, so you
Speaker 1: can it provides just a nice flash of what you're
Speaker 1: talking about here. Yeah. So this is obviously causing intense
Speaker 1: fear and paranoia around the world, and the idea is, okay,
Speaker 1: what can we do to save us from the new
Speaker 1: technological horror the bomber the air power force, and so
Speaker 1: you had things like anti aircraft guns, you had fighter planes.
Speaker 1: Everybody knew basically, and everybody agreed that these were insufficient.
Speaker 1: Even good anti air defenses would never stop all the
Speaker 1: bombers headed for your city. The best they could do
Speaker 1: is provide some deterrent and sort of reduced the bombing force.
Speaker 1: There was a generally correct sense that the bombers would
Speaker 1: always get through your defenses. And most military authorities realized
Speaker 1: that there was no total defense against air power, and
Speaker 1: that the only real defense was the threat of retaliation
Speaker 1: from the air power of your own. Like the best
Speaker 1: way to protect your cities from bombing was to just say, well,
Speaker 1: if you bomb us, will bomb you. Like, I feel
Speaker 1: like one of the the only way to perhaps imagine
Speaker 1: the scenario is to think about the fact that we
Speaker 1: have that that if a foreign force were to show
Speaker 1: up in orbit over Earth, we would have no defense
Speaker 1: against them dropping things upon us. And I mean literally
Speaker 1: dropping just heavy objects that would do tremendous damage, uh,
Speaker 1: just just by virtue of their orbital superiority. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean that's an analogous scenario. Yeah, it's like, what
Speaker 1: can you do to I mean, we could sort of
Speaker 1: shoot at them, but we wouldn't really have much of
Speaker 1: a defense. Right, Maybe you shoot one of them, right,
Speaker 1: but can you can you bring it all down? Probably not?
Speaker 1: And likewise, you're yet you're dealing with with multiple bombers. Uh,
Speaker 1: you're dealing with with with just growing ever growing air
Speaker 1: forces from all of these major powers at the time. Exactly.
Speaker 1: So if you are a well, whether you're a military
Speaker 1: commander or a civilian just sitting there and watching this
Speaker 1: build up of air power. This is like, Okay, you're
Speaker 1: just watching someone collect the weapons with which to attack
Speaker 1: the civilians on both sides of whatever war, on all
Speaker 1: sides of whatever war comes next. And to a large extent,
Speaker 1: this was a true prophecy because you look at air
Speaker 1: combat during the Second World War and it features all
Speaker 1: of these things. It features UH bombers that are able
Speaker 1: to reach pretty far around the world. You're you're you're
Speaker 1: seeing day bombers, night bombers, you're seeing the terror weapons,
Speaker 1: the V one and the V two of of the Germans,
Speaker 1: and then of course at the at the end of
Speaker 1: the war you're seeing UH, the the atomic bomb as well.
Speaker 1: So it was a true prophecy in many respects. Like
Speaker 1: the the paranoia was real. Yeah, and so the kind
Speaker 1: of sci fi technology of air power that had now
Speaker 1: become a reality made war a brand new kind of hell.
Speaker 1: Even in peace time held that um there was just
Speaker 1: this constant threat that would fill you with fear and
Speaker 1: you could never be safe from it. So people were
Speaker 1: yearning for the idea of something that could repel the bombers,
Speaker 1: something that could stop the bombers from getting through. And this,
Speaker 1: I think is the void that the death a really
Speaker 1: comes in to fill. Ironically, you know, we think of
Speaker 1: the death rays like a horrible you know, it's the
Speaker 1: weapon the villain has in the Superman serials or something. Yeah,
Speaker 1: But actually, more often the death ray was imagined as
Speaker 1: a sort of savior, a hero weapon, a hero defensive
Speaker 1: weapon that would be the only thing that you could
Speaker 1: that you could use to stop the bombers from reaching you.
Speaker 1: And this was how it was often sold by the
Speaker 1: scientists who are claiming to be working on them, or
Speaker 1: claimed or claiming to have invented them. They would say,
Speaker 1: I've made a death ray, and it will make war
Speaker 1: impossible because everyone now will have defenses against bombers and
Speaker 1: against air power that will prevent them from being attacked
Speaker 1: in their homes. And this is this is also kind
Speaker 1: of a prophetic in its own way, right, because this
Speaker 1: sounds an awful lot like Star Wars. You mean, not
Speaker 1: the Star Wars the movie, but the strategic defense initiatives,
Speaker 1: the idea that you could build a a network that
Speaker 1: would protect your nation against incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles. Fanning
Speaker 1: quotes one newspaper that characterized one of the many hyped
Speaker 1: claims of invented death ray as the flaming sword from Genesis.
Speaker 1: That's so good. But given all of this context, like
Speaker 1: the fear that has brought on, the quite legitimate fear
Speaker 1: of of air power, of bombing, of chemical weapons, and
Speaker 1: and all that, you can suddenly see why the death
Speaker 1: ray wasn't just a kind of esthetic curiosity having to
Speaker 1: do with like science fiction, that it was a thing
Speaker 1: that people felt they desperately needed. In reality, we've got
Speaker 1: to have a way to save us from the ravages
Speaker 1: of enemy air power should the next war break out,
Speaker 1: or to prevent the next war from breaking out in
Speaker 1: the first place. I mean to go back to the
Speaker 1: flaming sword thing. It's positioning it as as divine intervention. Yeah,
Speaker 1: because the angel with the sword is preventing Adam and
Speaker 1: Eve from returning to the garden, essentially from from from
Speaker 1: spoiling what should remain pure with their their imperfections. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and the like say the British or French press at
Speaker 1: the time, the equivalent, I think would have been preventing
Speaker 1: the return of the Germans in their inevitable war of revenge.
Speaker 1: And those fears would prove correct. Well, maybe we should
Speaker 1: take a break and then when we come back we
Speaker 1: can discuss specific claims from people who said in one
Speaker 1: way or another, at one time or another that they
Speaker 1: had made a death ray. Alright, we're back. So we
Speaker 1: we've laid the groundwork here. There was a desire for
Speaker 1: the death rays as this kind of holy technological protection,
Speaker 1: the flaming sword that would prevent the terror devil of
Speaker 1: air power from reaching your cities. Right, and and again
Speaker 1: think back to our episode on X rays. There are
Speaker 1: all these discoveries that are taking place about various rays,
Speaker 1: about about these previously undetectable properties of the world that
Speaker 1: can be exploited technologically to do amazing things. Yes, so
Speaker 1: if you could only create this invisible flaming sword out
Speaker 1: of the holy power of the cutting edge of technology
Speaker 1: and science to shoot down those enemy bombers and sort
Speaker 1: of like build a great energy wall around your civilization
Speaker 1: to keep it safe from all harm, wouldn't you want
Speaker 1: to do that? Yeah? And so we see various individuals
Speaker 1: developing or attempting develop, to develop, or claiming to have
Speaker 1: developed or or to be developing, uh, some sort of
Speaker 1: death ray technology. One great example that goes way back
Speaker 1: before any of these concerns about bombers or whatever. Uh,
Speaker 1: it goes all the way to the eighteen seventies. Fanning
Speaker 1: talks about this in his book Where There's This Guy.
Speaker 1: I actually looked up some newspaper articles about this guy
Speaker 1: from from the New Orleans area in the eighteen seventies.
Speaker 1: And this guy was called Professor James C. Wing Guard.
Speaker 1: And in the eighteen seventies he started claiming that he
Speaker 1: could harness something called quote, the Nameless Force, always capitalized
Speaker 1: the Nameless Force, and it was related to electricity, and
Speaker 1: it would, for instance, incinerate a boat at a distance.
Speaker 1: I think somebody should create a bar in New Orleans
Speaker 1: called the Nameless Force. That would be pretty great. That
Speaker 1: would be great. And he was like he was a
Speaker 1: local celebrity in a way, like lots of people would
Speaker 1: come out to watch his demonstrations. There was a point
Speaker 1: where he incinerated a boat on Lake Poncha Train at
Speaker 1: a distance, supposedly using array that commanded some kind of
Speaker 1: whatever this Nameless Force was. However, he was discovered to
Speaker 1: be a fraud. I think this This was proved conclusive
Speaker 1: when two people, including one of his assistants were killed
Speaker 1: in an eighteen seventy nine explosion while his assistant was
Speaker 1: trying to place a mind secretly to blow up a
Speaker 1: ship that he was claiming to use his nameless force on.
Speaker 1: So this is a great story to start with, because
Speaker 1: we're gonna see this pattern continue, maybe not with the
Speaker 1: fatal explode, but with this question. Am I looking at
Speaker 1: Mr Wizard? Or am I looking at a Wizard? You know?
Speaker 1: Am I? Am I looking at somebody who is definitely
Speaker 1: demonstrating a scientific property? Or am I looking at a Charlatan?
Speaker 1: Am I looking at somebody who is essentially a professional
Speaker 1: stage magician who is creating the effect of a death
Speaker 1: ray without actually demonstrating the science of it. And one
Speaker 1: of the things we have to keep in mind as
Speaker 1: we go forward is it's not always completely either or
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna look at a couple of people
Speaker 1: today who it seems are are some mix of real scientist,
Speaker 1: real inventor creating real inventions, and also Hoaxter and Charlatan,
Speaker 1: like the same person could be both at different times, right,
Speaker 1: And and I mean to give some of the Charlottan's credit,
Speaker 1: I guess it certainly does take a certain amount of
Speaker 1: skill to to say nothing of nerve to pull these
Speaker 1: kind of stunts, to make these claims, and then to
Speaker 1: uh to do what is nest acessary to to create
Speaker 1: the effect, even if it involves trickery. I mean, what's
Speaker 1: the difference between a stage magician and like a cult
Speaker 1: leader and a fraud. It's just like what they call
Speaker 1: their show, right. I always think back to the example
Speaker 1: of the pooping duck, the old automaton, UH, the machine
Speaker 1: that had the likeness of a duck, and they would
Speaker 1: demonstrated by a by feeding it food and then it
Speaker 1: would it would poop. And the idea was that the
Speaker 1: the the mechanical duck is digesting. It wasn't digesting. As
Speaker 1: it turns out, food just went one in one end
Speaker 1: and uh and some duck poop came out the other end.
Speaker 1: There was no connection between the two. But still it creates.
Speaker 1: It involves a certain amount of technological uh skill to
Speaker 1: create a duck that appears to be pooping like that.
Speaker 1: Solid trickery is a skill. But anyway, Robert, do you
Speaker 1: want to tell me about the story of one Giulio Levi. Yes,
Speaker 1: Ulivia is a wonderful story. Uh, and and Fanning goes
Speaker 1: into this story in depth. So remember those purported in
Speaker 1: rays that we discussed in our X ray episode. Yeah,
Speaker 1: so after the discovery of X rays, people just kept
Speaker 1: expecting to discover more kinds of rays. And in rays
Speaker 1: were these rays that lots of people claimed to have observed,
Speaker 1: but then we eventually discovered they just didn't exist. Well,
Speaker 1: get ready for F rays, because uh in, this is
Speaker 1: what we end up getting. In nineteen thirteen and nineteen fourteen,
Speaker 1: that's when newspapers began to report on a thirty three
Speaker 1: year old Italian inventor named Giulio u Levi. So he
Speaker 1: claimed to have invented a device that could explode gunpowder
Speaker 1: at a distance via these invisible F rays he called them. Okay.
Speaker 1: He claimed that he had like a ten mile range
Speaker 1: on this technology, but when French General Joseph Geoffrey requested
Speaker 1: greater range, he went ahead and bumped that up to
Speaker 1: fifteen miles. Okay. And of course the thing is Geoffrey
Speaker 1: also wanted to see a demonstration of the technology in action,
Speaker 1: and what followed would become of the familiar story in
Speaker 1: the death ray business of the early twentieth century. A
Speaker 1: test that seems engineered like a professional magic trick, uh
Speaker 1: and some international travel to pitch the tech two different nations.
Speaker 1: I think one thing that will emerge as we discuss
Speaker 1: a few of these examples is the idea of you
Speaker 1: should always be suspicious of somebody who wants to show
Speaker 1: you something, but they can only show it to you
Speaker 1: under extremely specific conditions that they set up exactly. And
Speaker 1: then it's also just crazy to think to look back
Speaker 1: and like, can you imagine this today? I mean, to
Speaker 1: a certain extent, I imagine this. This does happen, but
Speaker 1: where someone's like, yeah, hey, French military, I got this
Speaker 1: new to military technology. I'm showing it to the Russians
Speaker 1: next week, and technically Italy has first DIBs on it,
Speaker 1: but I'll go ahead and give you a demo. It's
Speaker 1: kind of crazy to imagine, but that's that's how it
Speaker 1: went down. So Jeoffrey says Levy, we got to see
Speaker 1: a uh, A demonstration of this, so you. Levy insists
Speaker 1: upon using a vessel flying under the British flag to
Speaker 1: conduct this experiment to this test, rather so that the
Speaker 1: French can't simply take his technology from him, which I
Speaker 1: guess I can I can see where he can make
Speaker 1: that case. So he ends up acquiring this use of
Speaker 1: this British private yacht, and then he uses his machine
Speaker 1: to detonate some submarine minds, ten of them at six
Speaker 1: yard intervals, and upon request, he also detonates some ammunition
Speaker 1: and UH and powder stores inside of a fortress. And
Speaker 1: according to Fanning, he succeeded in both ventures, though as
Speaker 1: becomes clear with the minds uh you leave, he seems
Speaker 1: to have supplied the explosives. But how are these results
Speaker 1: received by the audience. That's a big question, right because
Speaker 1: it was a demonstration. Apparently it depends on who you ask.
Speaker 1: Fanning points out that some accounts said that he made
Speaker 1: a favorable impressions why I will others say that he
Speaker 1: did not. And at any rate, when the French began
Speaker 1: to ask technical questions about what they had seen you leave,
Speaker 1: he quote gave responses not conforming to well known sigh
Speaker 1: sientific principles and even seemed not to understand the technological
Speaker 1: nature of some of the queries. That's not a good sign.
Speaker 1: And then he began to contradict himself, and then he
Speaker 1: started coming up with excuses not to do more demonstrations,
Speaker 1: particularly when they started bringing up things like, well, why
Speaker 1: what if the French military provides the explosives, what if
Speaker 1: we prepare the explosives or what have What have we
Speaker 1: just conducted this demonstration completely under military supervision? He said
Speaker 1: no at first. Now eventually he caves. But then are
Speaker 1: an interesting thing happens the apparatus keeps breaking down on him. Yeah,
Speaker 1: not working today. Yeah, and in this I'm reminded of
Speaker 1: the various con artists we've discussed this on Stuff to
Speaker 1: blow your mind before, whose power simply don't work in
Speaker 1: the same room as say James Randy's skepticism. Yeah, this
Speaker 1: is something you you tend to hear from from like
Speaker 1: psychics and stuff like that a lot. When they when
Speaker 1: they have their powers put under scrutiny or under controlled
Speaker 1: conditions established by a skeptical person, sometimes they will say
Speaker 1: the presence of skeptical people or the presence of nonbelievers
Speaker 1: somehow like makes their powers not work. I mean, I
Speaker 1: guess there they might even be suggesting like a cause
Speaker 1: between you know, like the fact that we've got doubters
Speaker 1: in the room exaps my my special powers away. This
Speaker 1: would just be like oop, since a coincidence. It doesn't
Speaker 1: work this time, but you remember it worked that other time, right. No.
Speaker 1: One of the crazy things about this case with Ulivias
Speaker 1: is that I read it and I'm thinking, oh, expose
Speaker 1: this guy, make make him do this demonstration under you know,
Speaker 1: a more rigorous supervision, But that they weren't approaching it
Speaker 1: quiet like they were not approaching him like James Randy
Speaker 1: looking to expose the con artist. They the military officers
Speaker 1: here legitimately wanted this to be real. Oh yeah, they were.
Speaker 1: They were invested. And so as it became more and
Speaker 1: more likely that there might be some sort of confidence
Speaker 1: game and play here, or some sort of con or
Speaker 1: the deception, it was more disappointment, according to Fanning than anything,
Speaker 1: because everyone had their hopes of they thought this might
Speaker 1: be it. So the French deal Uh ends up not
Speaker 1: going anywhere after three days of the apparatus not working.
Speaker 1: By coincidence, he ends up leaving France for good and
Speaker 1: attempts to sell his tech in England. And according to
Speaker 1: fanning account, does he reason that the English are more gullible?
Speaker 1: I don't know this. I mean this is a question
Speaker 1: that comes back to the central nature of the con artist,
Speaker 1: assuming and this is again open for discussion to what
Speaker 1: extent he is a true con artist. But you see
Speaker 1: this pattern with the con artist, right, they worked the
Speaker 1: con here and then they go somewhere else to it
Speaker 1: to work. And it's easy to say, what is your
Speaker 1: long term plan? Like, eventually, aren't you going to run
Speaker 1: out of marks? Aren't you going to eventually, you know,
Speaker 1: expose yourself. It's a big world, there's a lot of
Speaker 1: places to go. Yeah, I guess so, I mean it
Speaker 1: was maybe, you know, in some respects a bigger world
Speaker 1: at that time. So he goes to England and according
Speaker 1: of Fanning, accounts of what happened with the British are varied. Uh,
Speaker 1: but what what ended up happening? You ended up with
Speaker 1: the same pattern, right, more dubious experiments, including the fact
Speaker 1: that the effect required some sort of device be placed
Speaker 1: on the explosives that I certainly, from from our standpoint, um,
Speaker 1: that's suspicious. And it was unclear if the British later
Speaker 1: even used his supposed f rays and technology and in
Speaker 1: in one of the attributed experiments involving offshore detonations, but
Speaker 1: it sounds like the remote detonation of a mind was
Speaker 1: accomplished at any rate you leave didn't hook the British
Speaker 1: and eventually returned home to Italy, and there the Italian
Speaker 1: government they set him up in Florence, and he continued
Speaker 1: to impress many people with his experiments and continued to
Speaker 1: insist on total control over those experiments. And so he
Speaker 1: also continued to garner criticism during this time because even
Speaker 1: though there were plenty of people that were saying, I
Speaker 1: think this is the real deal. I think he's he's
Speaker 1: onto something, look at these these tremendous demonstrations, others were saying,
Speaker 1: I don't know. He controls all the experiments, making a
Speaker 1: lot of excuses, a lot of excuses. I think he
Speaker 1: might be a car artist. I think he might be Uh.
Speaker 1: I think maybe this is all made up. There's some
Speaker 1: sort of trickery involved here. More excuses are made to
Speaker 1: avoid tests that he can't control himself and uh. And
Speaker 1: there there's there's even this situation where a seismologist by
Speaker 1: the name of Padre Guido Alfani comes and says, hey, look,
Speaker 1: let's let's just do a simple uh demonstration here. I'll
Speaker 1: just set up some explosive, some gunpowder, and it's three
Speaker 1: meters away, use your device to set it off, and
Speaker 1: it'll be observed, will be controlled. This is a situation
Speaker 1: where all Fani wanted to believe. He thought that, uh,
Speaker 1: that that that believe he was onto something. And he said,
Speaker 1: let's just let's just get rid of the criticism. Let's
Speaker 1: just go ahead and prove it. What are you doing,
Speaker 1: Let's just prove it. There's one great part of the
Speaker 1: story where it seems like he tried to leverage his
Speaker 1: potential military contracts into a marriage to a daughter of
Speaker 1: a military official. Yeah. Yeah, he ended uh, he ended
Speaker 1: up eloping with the daughter of Italian Navy Admiral Pietro
Speaker 1: of Fernari. Oh and the daughter her name was Maria,
Speaker 1: and he renamed the f Rays after her. They became
Speaker 1: the em Rays. Oh, that's right, they become the Rays later. Yes,
Speaker 1: So around this time as well, the New York Times
Speaker 1: ran a story that claimed that that they had figured
Speaker 1: out the trick here, and that was that Levy was
Speaker 1: detonating sea mines by boring a hole in each mine
Speaker 1: and then stuffing sodium inside and then placing a small
Speaker 1: amount of wool stuffing that into the opening. Okay, so
Speaker 1: we all know what happens when you get like pure
Speaker 1: sodium wet, it ignites and if that and then that
Speaker 1: if that's touching gunpowder, then that's going to explode. Right.
Speaker 1: So what he's done here, according to this New York
Speaker 1: Times article, was that he created a simple timer. So
Speaker 1: he messes with the mine, the explosive, whatever the thing
Speaker 1: is they're trying to detonate, and you just kind of
Speaker 1: point your beam at it and fiddle around, right, And
Speaker 1: there was fiddling. That's an important thing. He had to
Speaker 1: make adjustments to the beam, fine tuning in order and
Speaker 1: also in order to find what he's trying to explode.
Speaker 1: So he have he has a general time frame in
Speaker 1: mind about how long it will take for for the
Speaker 1: salt water to soak through and reach the sodium. Uh.
Speaker 1: That gives him, you know, that gives him a rough
Speaker 1: time frame and then you can just fiddle with the
Speaker 1: controls until the explosion occurs. And sometimes it would take
Speaker 1: longer for him to find an explosive, this explosive rather
Speaker 1: than another. So you can imagine him there saying, well,
Speaker 1: I'm still looking for it. I'm still looking for it,
Speaker 1: and then boom, I found it. Now that could be
Speaker 1: a good explanation, but Fanning doesn't seem satisfied that that
Speaker 1: that that gets to everything right, that's right. Fanning says
Speaker 1: that it doesn't explain some of the demos, such as
Speaker 1: that Fortress demo, which again the French asked him to do.
Speaker 1: They said, hey, we there's some explosives here, blow it up,
Speaker 1: and it apparently worked. Also, some of the torpedoed nations
Speaker 1: that he he did later on various publications at the
Speaker 1: time jumped to his defense and he actually managed to
Speaker 1: keep this act up for seemingly the rest of his
Speaker 1: life um death. Yeah, which again, if he's if he's
Speaker 1: more on the con artist's side, if he's more on
Speaker 1: the Wizard side, then that's that's very frustrating to think
Speaker 1: that he got away with it that long. On the
Speaker 1: other hand, if he's got at least a little bit
Speaker 1: of Mr Wizard in there, if if he was onto
Speaker 1: something and just wasn't able to or willing to know
Speaker 1: fully demonstrate it or develop it, then I don't know. Well,
Speaker 1: I mean, we always have to consider the possibility that
Speaker 1: whatever f rays are, I mean, he he may have
Speaker 1: had some technological apparatus that did something, but it didn't work.
Speaker 1: Maybe as well as he wanted it to or as
Speaker 1: well as he was advertising. So, I mean, there's always
Speaker 1: the possibility that when somebody's using trickery of this kind
Speaker 1: that it's a top to bottom total hoax, or maybe
Speaker 1: that they're just that they're amplifying what they would actually
Speaker 1: be able to do, or making more consistent results by
Speaker 1: using tricks and line to people. So perhaps he developed
Speaker 1: something that worked, say of the time. But then if
Speaker 1: you're doing a demonstration and trying to sell it and
Speaker 1: you're you know, you don't have like a really firm
Speaker 1: moral compass, maybe you go ahead and rig the explosions
Speaker 1: just to ensure that the demo goes well. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: you know you don't want this, you know, wanted to
Speaker 1: be like one of these situations where you're you're unveiling
Speaker 1: your new operating system and you get the screen of death, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and you know, remote detonation of explosives is not something
Speaker 1: that would have been like unthinkable at the time. In fact,
Speaker 1: the guy were about to talk about also performed similar
Speaker 1: demonstrations of remote detonation of explosives, and though he later
Speaker 1: made claims of technology that seemed to not have much
Speaker 1: basis in fact or contain elements of hoaxing. Uh you
Speaker 1: know you you could probably remote blow up a mind
Speaker 1: in the nineteen teens. That seems within cutting edge inventor parameters.
Speaker 1: Then absolutely so. Anyway, this I guess this brings us
Speaker 1: to maybe the star of this episode, a guy named
Speaker 1: Harry Grindel Matthews. I have to say, every time I
Speaker 1: read his name, I read it in my mind is
Speaker 1: Grindel wald Wald? What is that? What is that like?
Speaker 1: H Is that like a Pokemon guy? No, No, he's
Speaker 1: a He's an evil wizard in the Harry Potter universe. Okay, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right. Yeah, are our our guy here though that
Speaker 1: we're talking about. It's probably a little more Gilderoy Lockhart though,
Speaker 1: So Harry Grendel matt Well, this will come back because
Speaker 1: Harry Grendel Matthews. He was born in the year eighteen
Speaker 1: eighty in the village of Winterborne, Gloucestershire, which is in
Speaker 1: southwest England, and apparently J. K. Rowling, the author of
Speaker 1: the Harry Potter books, lived in that same village for
Speaker 1: part of her childhood. Wow, all right, well, maybe there
Speaker 1: is a direct grinder grindle Wald reference here strange kawinky dink.
Speaker 1: So maybe we'll see if there are any more parallels
Speaker 1: emerging between the two. Harry's anyway, Harry Grendel Matthews. He
Speaker 1: was an electrical engine nearby training. He fought in South
Speaker 1: Africa in the Second Boer War at the turn of
Speaker 1: the twentieth century. I think he was part of a
Speaker 1: constabulary unit. And after that he devoted his life to
Speaker 1: inventing things, claiming to have invented things, and hyping those
Speaker 1: claimed inventions. So he has a bunch of supposed inventions
Speaker 1: credited to him. One of them is a radio telephone,
Speaker 1: which he claimed could transmit calls wirelessly between ground stations
Speaker 1: and airplanes. And you can immediately see the military relevance there.
Speaker 1: Absolutely able to an ability to communicate with your bombers,
Speaker 1: your your your connaissance planes, et cetera. Yeah, So, in
Speaker 1: nineteen twelve he was actually invited to Buckingham Palace to
Speaker 1: demonstrate the invention for Queen Mary. Unfortunately, this appointment did
Speaker 1: not go so well. Some engineers present wanted to look
Speaker 1: inside his device, and he didn't like this, and he
Speaker 1: got mad and left suspicious. But inconclusive, he could have
Speaker 1: just he could just been very particular about his technology, right.
Speaker 1: He also invented a certain thod for producing talking motion pictures,
Speaker 1: basically a method for playing sound on film. Uh. And
Speaker 1: Grendel Matthews would later go on to show a sustained
Speaker 1: interest in working with film and TV. Yeah, if if
Speaker 1: I remember correctly the ideas. He used this technology to
Speaker 1: interview Shackleton, Oh, Ernst Shackleton, Yeah, for the was it
Speaker 1: Arctic or Antarctic expedition? Antarctic the thing, not Frankenstein. That's
Speaker 1: a good distinction. Uh. He also supposedly invented a light
Speaker 1: projector which could display images against the night sky or
Speaker 1: against a large surface like the side of a building.
Speaker 1: We'll come back to that later. And then in December
Speaker 1: nineteen fifteen, while World War One was going on, Grendel
Speaker 1: Matthews performed a demonstration at a pond in London in
Speaker 1: front of an audience of British admirals and other officials.
Speaker 1: And this demonstration showed off remote control of some war
Speaker 1: relevant machines, including remote control of a model boat which
Speaker 1: he could steer around and shoot the gun of, and
Speaker 1: remote detonation of a mind and strangely, at least to me.
Speaker 1: The reports UH from the time indicate the Grendel Matthews
Speaker 1: controlled his model boat and his explosives not by means
Speaker 1: of a radio antenna, but by aiming a searchlight at
Speaker 1: them to control a selenium element. And from all accounts
Speaker 1: I can find, it seems like this demonstration was actually
Speaker 1: a success. It it as I can't tell any reason
Speaker 1: to think that this technology didn't actually work. Grindall, Matthews
Speaker 1: was given a cash award of twenty five thousand pounds
Speaker 1: of payment from the government, and he was promised more
Speaker 1: if he could develop a remote controlled aerial torpedo, but
Speaker 1: he never did that. And there was a lot of
Speaker 1: overlap at this time between the concepts of like a
Speaker 1: ray weapon and simply the wireless remote control of machines
Speaker 1: like I don't know if you noticed this in the reading,
Speaker 1: but sometimes these ideas seemed to blur together at the time,
Speaker 1: as if like a remote control car would be this
Speaker 1: like something in the same class as ray weapons. I thought,
Speaker 1: that's kind of odd, but well, the idea of controlling
Speaker 1: something at a distance and and or uh of sending
Speaker 1: energy to a machine or to a or to a target,
Speaker 1: either enough to power some sort of a machine, or
Speaker 1: to detonate a bunch of gunpowder. Well, if you go
Speaker 1: and read these articles from the time about death rays,
Speaker 1: very often they mentioned they're like, okay, we could annihilate
Speaker 1: an army or shoot or whatever. But then they almost
Speaker 1: always mentioned or stop the engines of an airplane. That
Speaker 1: I mean that that goes right back to the main motivation,
Speaker 1: like the kind of next war paranoia. That's uh, that's
Speaker 1: motivating these hopes for a death ray, the idea that
Speaker 1: they could stop bombers from reaching your cities. There's this
Speaker 1: overlap between it as a just direct, destructive physical weapon
Speaker 1: and something that could exert a power or control mechanism
Speaker 1: from a distance, especially over engines and motors. Uh. And
Speaker 1: and it also helps symphasize that despite the name, the
Speaker 1: death ray is not always expected to just kill though
Speaker 1: maybe maybe you could consider that as killing an engine
Speaker 1: or killing a machine. But anyway. Grendel Matthews received his
Speaker 1: greatest fame by far when in nineteen twenty three and
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty four he started to announce his creation of
Speaker 1: a wireless means of of beaming energy at a distance
Speaker 1: sufficient to take down aircraft. And this was the birth
Speaker 1: of the Grendel Matthews death Ray. And I want to
Speaker 1: be clear again, that's not our retroactive appellation. And that's
Speaker 1: what he called it, though he later claimed that he
Speaker 1: found the term inaccurate, but he he authorized calling it
Speaker 1: that as evidenced by a film that he had made
Speaker 1: to promote the device. Maybe we should take a break
Speaker 1: and then we come back to a film review. All right,
Speaker 1: we're back. So the Death Ray Harry Harry Grendel Matthew's
Speaker 1: own promotional film on his death ray, called the Death Ray.
Speaker 1: We will include a link to to the YouTube upload
Speaker 1: of this, uh, this very film. It's definitely worth feeling
Speaker 1: because it is. It is weird and uh and and hilarious. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's so. It's directed by again him Gaston kura Bay
Speaker 1: who otherwise he was a French director. Otherwise seems to
Speaker 1: have specialized in short sort of locale documentaries, such as
Speaker 1: a run round Godstone and through cheddar Gorge, but later
Speaker 1: he went on to make early science fiction pictures called
Speaker 1: things like The Fugitive Futurist, which is about a down
Speaker 1: on his gambler who is approached by an inventor with
Speaker 1: a machine that can predict the future. I'm I'm intrigued.
Speaker 1: It's a good sell. I think he essentially became known
Speaker 1: for being a director who could do like special effects,
Speaker 1: you know, that he could do like a trick photography,
Speaker 1: which in retrospect makes this very suspicious as a film
Speaker 1: that is supposed to be demonstrating a new technology. Yes,
Speaker 1: but the Death Ray it builds itself as a nonfiction
Speaker 1: documentary quote, a picturization of some of the president future
Speaker 1: possibilities of a great scientific discovery. The funny thing about
Speaker 1: the the YouTube riff of it that we were listening
Speaker 1: to anyway, it has just this delightful uh soundtrack. This
Speaker 1: is sort of typical old timey silent movie music going
Speaker 1: on in the background. Yeah, it's the steamboat itchy piano music.
Speaker 1: The film also it's I don't know, it's not shy
Speaker 1: about what it claims. Grendel Matthews quotes himself in it.
Speaker 1: There's this quote, within fifteen years, the machine gun will
Speaker 1: only be found in museums. Why because quote the Grendel
Speaker 1: Matthew's death Ray in the future may control the destiny
Speaker 1: of the world. Well, so how does the death ray work?
Speaker 1: You hope the film will show you Instead the film
Speaker 1: makes you wait. First, it tells you about Grendel Matthew's
Speaker 1: other inventions and achievements, like the light controlled boat. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it reminds me a lot of promotional videos in that respect,
Speaker 1: you know, like really drives home how brilliant this guy is.
Speaker 1: With frequent shots, I think it's the same shot because
Speaker 1: you know it's expensive to show, right, especially at the time.
Speaker 1: It's a shot of Grendel Matthews at his desk like
Speaker 1: sort of pretending to write something, pretending to work, and
Speaker 1: then stopping as if an idea has seized him and
Speaker 1: he stares off into the middle distance to think about it.
Speaker 1: There's another part where yeah, that part is great, And
Speaker 1: then it goes to Grendel Matthews getting on a plane
Speaker 1: to come to France to make the film that you're
Speaker 1: currently watching, and it tells you that's what you're seeing.
Speaker 1: And I think all movies should have this, Like the
Speaker 1: next Avejurs movie should start with the producer getting on
Speaker 1: a plane to go have a meeting to make the
Speaker 1: movie you're about to see. There's a there's also the course.
Speaker 1: The key to this is the first scene where they're
Speaker 1: actually going to demonstrate this technology. Yes. So they get
Speaker 1: to his lab HGM and his lab with a bunch
Speaker 1: of assistants showing the death ray at work. And this
Speaker 1: scene is wonderful because first you see two men they're
Speaker 1: sort of you know, messing around with the death ray,
Speaker 1: get ready to use it, and then two other guys
Speaker 1: just come strolling into the room in for one of
Speaker 1: the death threats right now, they're just straight down range
Speaker 1: of it. Yeah. No, no, no safety protocols at all,
Speaker 1: which I guess wouldn't be that unbelievable at the time,
Speaker 1: but still it's it's kind of hilarious in this film. Well,
Speaker 1: he did later claim that he had like been injured
Speaker 1: by his own inventions. He claimed to have lost sight
Speaker 1: in one eye by doing experiments with the death ray.
Speaker 1: But as we discussed in our we discussed a similar
Speaker 1: like real cases of injuries occurring in in X ray
Speaker 1: with X ray technology. So it's very believable that he
Speaker 1: could have I mean, yes, he could have heard himself
Speaker 1: messing around with technology that he understood or even halfway understood,
Speaker 1: but he could have also just been inspired by these
Speaker 1: tales of real scientists um suffering you know, radiation related injuries.
Speaker 1: So after that there. There are two main demonstrations. They
Speaker 1: used the ray to remotely illuminate an electric light. Then
Speaker 1: they used the ray to blow up a pile of
Speaker 1: gunpowder at a distance. But how does it work? The
Speaker 1: most of the movie tells you is quote the general
Speaker 1: principle of the death ray is that the object is
Speaker 1: first located by the electrical beam, which forms a path
Speaker 1: through which the controlled electrical energy is transmitted. Doesn't get
Speaker 1: much more specific than that. Um And then they take
Speaker 1: it outside and they just shows them sort of working
Speaker 1: it outside, and it flashes a few title cards at
Speaker 1: you with a little more, you know, some vague language
Speaker 1: about electricity and how it's said like porcelain housing, and
Speaker 1: they have this sort of larger scale, sort of anti
Speaker 1: aircraft looking version of it. Yeah, and then it ends
Speaker 1: with what it like immediately cuts to like a burning
Speaker 1: city or burning building. Yeah, as if as if he
Speaker 1: has just demonstrated its awful force by taking out saying
Speaker 1: in an entire factory or something. Yes, it looks as
Speaker 1: if they're implying that he has demonstrated the use of
Speaker 1: the death ray on a city in France. It seems
Speaker 1: to suggest that it isn't clear Also, I think it's
Speaker 1: funny that the film it repeats this special phrase both
Speaker 1: words capitalized luminate or burn, and they're capitalized and italicized,
Speaker 1: So it looks like this was supposed to become the
Speaker 1: trademark slogan of the Death Ray, where you know, you'd
Speaker 1: like see the ad for it in Look magazine and
Speaker 1: it'll be it''s like eleven herbs and spices or taste
Speaker 1: the rainbow, illuminate or burn. Well, you know, I guess,
Speaker 1: I mean it does. It does get to the fact
Speaker 1: that any like new technology is going to be able
Speaker 1: to You're gonna be able to illuminate or burn with it, right,
Speaker 1: You're gonna be able to uh to hurt and use
Speaker 1: it as an instrument of war or do something beneficial. Right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's true. Maybe she's born with it. Maybe it's death Ray.
Speaker 1: I guess this is kind of a tangent. But the
Speaker 1: film here makes me think in an even broader way
Speaker 1: about terrifying, unfamiliar technologies of war in the nineteen twenties
Speaker 1: and thirties, not just the apocalyptic new technological threat of
Speaker 1: aerial bombing, but of information warfare. Because a film like
Speaker 1: this could easily be used as a form of high
Speaker 1: tech propaganda at the time. Yeah, it reeks of propaganda.
Speaker 1: It's just personal propaganda, Yes, like at a time when
Speaker 1: people I mean, I don't know honestly how wary and
Speaker 1: how savvy people were about what they were watching in
Speaker 1: films at the time, But I wonder if this was
Speaker 1: at a time when people were not used to films
Speaker 1: and we're not used to special effects, and we're not
Speaker 1: used to being skeptical about the potentially misleading powers of editing.
Speaker 1: Like if that is the case, if people were less
Speaker 1: skeptical about that kind of thing back, then would an
Speaker 1: audience necessarily understand that a film was tricking them if
Speaker 1: it just showed them a thing looking like a ray
Speaker 1: gun and then immediately cut to footage of a city
Speaker 1: on fire, or would you be more sort of naturally
Speaker 1: gullibly just lad to believe that that must be what
Speaker 1: the ray gun did? I would I would love to
Speaker 1: explore this particular topic in more detail when we we
Speaker 1: can come back and discuss the invention of the motion picture. Yes,
Speaker 1: because I think about this a lot watching films with
Speaker 1: with my son who who's six and and certainly at
Speaker 1: an age where he you know, he understands the complexity
Speaker 1: of things that a lot more. But at the same time,
Speaker 1: there's so much about filmmaking he doesn't know. There's a way,
Speaker 1: there's something, there's a way of watching a film as
Speaker 1: a child that you just can't do when you're older,
Speaker 1: when you know how movies are made, you know, the
Speaker 1: gage is wide open. Just you just accept it. Like
Speaker 1: he he can watch a film with the level of
Speaker 1: immersion that is so very rare that for me as
Speaker 1: an adult, like I have to just be totally blown
Speaker 1: away or sucked in by a film to lose myself
Speaker 1: and forget that I'm watching a film. But for him,
Speaker 1: it's more, it's more like the default. Um And and
Speaker 1: certainly you hear stories about people watching films during the
Speaker 1: silent film area. Some of these early films, say footage
Speaker 1: of a train barreling towards the camera and being freaked
Speaker 1: out by it, or an outlaw appointing his gun at
Speaker 1: the camera. Yeah, that sort of thing. Yeah, And so
Speaker 1: I would say it's possible that the same way our
Speaker 1: cities were unprepared for air bombers and mustard gas, are
Speaker 1: the people of the time we're maybe unprepared for the
Speaker 1: psychological warfare potential of the cinema, of film editing and
Speaker 1: special effects trickery. And of course we don't need to
Speaker 1: just speculate about this. I mean, at least in one way,
Speaker 1: we know the war motivating power of of film as
Speaker 1: a as a propaganda delivery system. I think about the
Speaker 1: use of cinema in Germany as a weapon to seed
Speaker 1: and cultivate the prejudices of the people, like spreading anti Semitism,
Speaker 1: spreading other forms of racism, promoting this sense of authoritarian patriotism.
Speaker 1: And you can easily see how like the emerging art
Speaker 1: and technology of film could be a powerful weapon also
Speaker 1: of deterrence against a potential enemy. If you're showing your
Speaker 1: enemies of film that that is supposedly showing off some
Speaker 1: weapon you have, but using movie magic to create the
Speaker 1: illusion that your military to technology is unstoppable, uh, and
Speaker 1: that it might be useless to fight against you. In fact,
Speaker 1: you know what this reminds me of mentioning psychic research again,
Speaker 1: like the idea of that that Russian uh, that Russian
Speaker 1: video from I guess it was the sixties or the seventies.
Speaker 1: I don't quite recall of the girl who could like
Speaker 1: stop a frog's heart with her mind supposedly, And the
Speaker 1: question is, so, you know, Russian State TV at the
Speaker 1: time produced this video, and the question is were they
Speaker 1: producing of a video that they thought was of a
Speaker 1: real psychic power that they could use for warfare or
Speaker 1: was it an intentional hoax designed to trick the Russian
Speaker 1: people into thinking their government had this power? Or was
Speaker 1: it a hoax designed to trick their their enemies abroad
Speaker 1: into thinking they had this power and thus to you know,
Speaker 1: become scared and waste resources, uh, studying psychic research on
Speaker 1: their own. Well, we've seen even today though, that if
Speaker 1: another nation produces a video or has some sort of
Speaker 1: a press conference about some new military technology that they
Speaker 1: have or claim to have, it's gonna make headlines in
Speaker 1: rival nations. We've seen that with North Korean um uh
Speaker 1: you know bad c g I of missiles taking out
Speaker 1: North America. We've seen that with releases from the Russian
Speaker 1: government of the various new weapons systems that have have
Speaker 1: been at least claimed to have been developed. So, yeah,
Speaker 1: the film is a powerful thing. Propaganda is a powerful thing.
Speaker 1: But let's get back to grindel Wald or grind Matthews. Right. So,
Speaker 1: beginning in nineteen twenty four, Grinda Wald met Grinda Wald
Speaker 1: Grendel Matthews. He was all over the place. He was
Speaker 1: hyping this death ray and sometimes performing demonstrations in which
Speaker 1: this death ray would be used to do things like
Speaker 1: stop a motorcycle engine at a distance of several yards,
Speaker 1: or turn on an electric lamp at a distance, or
Speaker 1: supposedly sometimes even kill a living target such as a mouse.
Speaker 1: And in a lot of ways, the press ate it up.
Speaker 1: You know, newspapers and magazines all around the world published
Speaker 1: these articles on Grindel math Use and his startling discovery
Speaker 1: of the death ray. That would, you know, make war impossible,
Speaker 1: often in the context of this savior technology, right, it
Speaker 1: would prevent the next war. And HGM attracted the attention
Speaker 1: of potential private investors. He attracted the attention of governments. Unfortunately,
Speaker 1: I think there are a lot of notes of the
Speaker 1: Allevie syndrome here. There are repeated mixed reports about the
Speaker 1: success of his demonstrations. Grendel Matthews would sometimes refuse to
Speaker 1: or not sometimes pretty much always refuse to divulge technical
Speaker 1: specifics about how his death ray worked, and he would
Speaker 1: refuse to perform additional demonstrations under new conditions. So you
Speaker 1: know that makes you wonder there's no try it before
Speaker 1: you buy it, right. Uh So here's my take. I
Speaker 1: think it's certain that Grendel Matthew's Death Ray couldn't do
Speaker 1: all of the amazing things he was claiming, like shooting
Speaker 1: airplanes out of the sky or burning cities. But it's
Speaker 1: not clear to me whether the Death through A was
Speaker 1: a complete and total hoax top to bottom, or whether
Speaker 1: it did something just far less impressive than had been promised.
Speaker 1: And one does have to wonner. You're getting back to
Speaker 1: that idea that it's not necessarily just Wizard or Mr
Speaker 1: Wizard is not necessarily scientist or con artists, but they're
Speaker 1: being room for this middle area. And I keep thinking,
Speaker 1: as we've been recording this, I keep thinking about the
Speaker 1: fact that there is a world war going on in
Speaker 1: the background of all this, and or the aftermath of
Speaker 1: the of a world war. Yeah, this would have been
Speaker 1: the aftermath, but yeah, but that's what every everybody had
Speaker 1: in mind. So you have this tremendously traumatic experience that
Speaker 1: everyone has has has survived or barely survived, that is
Speaker 1: informing this and you have to uh, it's like it's
Speaker 1: easy to put yourselves in his shoes. So I can't
Speaker 1: help but wonder to what extent that trauma affects him
Speaker 1: as well, if if that's playing into his decision or
Speaker 1: at least his the series of decisions that lead to
Speaker 1: this has this space between um uh, scientific endeavor and
Speaker 1: just a pure con job. Another way you can think
Speaker 1: about it is imagine. The way is that, you know,
Speaker 1: people writing grant proposals for research projects very very often
Speaker 1: over hype what they're what they're gonna discover, right right.
Speaker 1: This is you know, they're not necessarily lying, they're just
Speaker 1: offering a best case scenario for what their discovery could yield.
Speaker 1: You know, like somebody working on studying I don't know,
Speaker 1: the movements of snakes and water might say this could potentially,
Speaker 1: you know, lead to the creation of new robots that
Speaker 1: could save lives, and you know what, I yeah, it's
Speaker 1: my favorite part of coming back to Eureka. It's one
Speaker 1: of my favorite part of any Eureka Alert press release
Speaker 1: is that you're gonna get down to that part where
Speaker 1: they say they just speculate loosely on what this might
Speaker 1: do in the future, right, And so it's not it's
Speaker 1: not that they're lying, but they are. They are trying
Speaker 1: to like offer some enticing charity to people with money
Speaker 1: who might be able to fund their research, which the
Speaker 1: people doing the research think is valuable for maybe all
Speaker 1: kinds of reasons, or the science writer who picks up
Speaker 1: on it, and maybe they're bored with the release until
Speaker 1: you mentioned, hey, it could when they lead to uh,
Speaker 1: talking robots or you know, curing the sick, Yeah, x,
Speaker 1: y or z. And in many cases maybe it could
Speaker 1: actually lead to something like that. But it's a you know,
Speaker 1: it's a small incremental step, and you've got to you've
Speaker 1: got to remind people of what the potential big picture is.
Speaker 1: You wonder if some people at the time were actually
Speaker 1: not creating death rays that could make war obsolete. They
Speaker 1: were actually creating something very modest, but they were thinking, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is a step in the right direction. And in
Speaker 1: order to get the funding, I need to keep working
Speaker 1: on this, or to get it in the hands of
Speaker 1: people who could look at it and understand what's going on,
Speaker 1: I need to overhype it a little bit. Well, not
Speaker 1: only that, like I need to overhype it to help
Speaker 1: save the world. To come back to that idea that
Speaker 1: this would be the burning sword that would save the
Speaker 1: world from the next great war that would surely do
Speaker 1: us all in. Yeah. Now, but then again, I want
Speaker 1: to be clear, I'm not saying I think we know
Speaker 1: that this is the case about Ulivi or Grendall, Matthews
Speaker 1: or any of these guys. I mean, they might have
Speaker 1: been just like complete thieves and we don't know. But
Speaker 1: but if there really was anything to it, it seems
Speaker 1: like the most likely explanation, according to skeptical experts at
Speaker 1: the time, was that the ray created some kind of
Speaker 1: beam path through the air that would be a conductor
Speaker 1: for electricity. And so one explanation along these lines was
Speaker 1: speaking to The New York Times. I think this was
Speaker 1: in ninety four a doctor Alfred In Goldsmith, an electrical
Speaker 1: engineering professor at the College of the City of New
Speaker 1: York and the chief radio broadcasting engineer of the Radio
Speaker 1: Corporation of America. He hypothesized that the death ray worked
Speaker 1: by shooting a beam of ultra violet light, which was
Speaker 1: known at the time to ionize the air, and then
Speaker 1: in turn that would create a tunnel of ionized air
Speaker 1: that would serve as a kind of wire for conducting
Speaker 1: electricity to the target, and this would this would essentially
Speaker 1: create a kind of artificial lightning. Now this take might
Speaker 1: be too generous, but it's interesting, like in the modern world,
Speaker 1: there are actually devices that have been advertised as working
Speaker 1: kind of like this. One example would be there were
Speaker 1: reports in twelve of a US military research project called
Speaker 1: the Laser induced Plasma Channel or l I p C, which,
Speaker 1: instead of a beam of ultra violet light us as
Speaker 1: a laser. But it's the same principle. You send a
Speaker 1: laser pulse directed through the air and that creates a
Speaker 1: channel of ionized air molecules, meaning the air molecules are
Speaker 1: stripped of their electrons so they become a plasma. And
Speaker 1: this plasma conducts electricity very well, while the intact air
Speaker 1: particles all around it do not conduct electricity well and
Speaker 1: they form an insulator. So you've got this tunnel of
Speaker 1: ionized gas created by the laser that can supposedly be
Speaker 1: used to conduct a bolt of electricity like lightning to
Speaker 1: a target, say a bunch of explosive ordinance. But the
Speaker 1: fact that this kind of research is purported it to
Speaker 1: exist today should not make us conclude that Grendel Matthews
Speaker 1: could or did actually achieve something similar. And his flakiness
Speaker 1: and secretiveness about the device, especially coupled with that horrible movie,
Speaker 1: it all makes me suspicious, right, But of course we're
Speaker 1: not the only ones who are suspicious. We're not the
Speaker 1: only ones who were suspicious. No, there was a ton
Speaker 1: of skeptical Grindel Matthews backlash at the time, with publications
Speaker 1: like Scientific American basically mocking him and dismantling his claims, saying,
Speaker 1: you know, what he was claiming was impossible. But then
Speaker 1: there were also a lot of people who championed the
Speaker 1: supposed invention. He got a ton of press coverage. Uh,
Speaker 1: and his claims did not just find a sympathetic year
Speaker 1: with the press and much of the public. Some actual
Speaker 1: leaders to really took notice. Robert, can you do a
Speaker 1: Winston Churchill voice? I was actually listening to Winston Churchill
Speaker 1: earlier this morning, so maybe I can. Let's see so.
Speaker 1: In a April nine letter to one of his science advisors,
Speaker 1: quoted in Fanning's book, Winston Churchill wrote the follow wing,
Speaker 1: I wish you would make inquiries about the man who
Speaker 1: is said to have discovered a ray which will kill
Speaker 1: at a certain distance. I meet people who say that
Speaker 1: it can actually be seen to kill mice, etcetera. It
Speaker 1: may all be a hoax, but my experience has been
Speaker 1: not to take no for an answer. You know, I
Speaker 1: don't actually know what Winston Churchill's voice sounds like at
Speaker 1: the moment. I mean i've heard him before, I can't
Speaker 1: remember it. So whatever that was, that was great. There's
Speaker 1: a track by this uh, this artist I love recorded
Speaker 1: under the name wax Factor. Uh, and now I think
Speaker 1: he uses the moniker Pete Sasquatch right now. But he
Speaker 1: had this great track um that utilizes the sample from
Speaker 1: Winston Churchill talking about uh, just you know about how
Speaker 1: how nothing can stop the Allied response. Uh, it's it's
Speaker 1: it's wonderful. Was it that we will fight them on
Speaker 1: the beaches speech? Um? I'm not sure if it's from
Speaker 1: that that that clip that is not utilized in the song,
Speaker 1: but uh, it is from it might be from that
Speaker 1: same speech I'm a shake gown which speech it's actually from? Well, anyway,
Speaker 1: Churchill he wanted to get in on the death ray.
Speaker 1: He's like, if there's death ray to be had, England
Speaker 1: must have it. And certainly he's this guy he's talking about,
Speaker 1: he's talking about a guy who's continuing to show up
Speaker 1: in the news. Yeah, you know, so it's it's it's
Speaker 1: kind of like the situation with the leaving, like so
Speaker 1: somebody is going to say, hey, well, let's find out,
Speaker 1: just prove it. Just find out this guy that nobody everybody,
Speaker 1: they won't shut up about this this beam uh technology
Speaker 1: that he has. Let's get to the bottom of it.
Speaker 1: And apparently HTMs research was at least once brought up
Speaker 1: for debate in the British Parliament, with members of the
Speaker 1: House of Commons asking the Undersecretary for Air about updates
Speaker 1: on the status of the government's potential relationship with Grendel
Speaker 1: Matthews and his ray and uh, funny enough, whether or
Speaker 1: not anybody actually had anything like a working death ray
Speaker 1: at the time, all the major governments started piping up,
Speaker 1: like in the British and the French governments were like, uh,
Speaker 1: we've already got a death rom and the German offici
Speaker 1: all told the Chicago Tribune in that year that Germany
Speaker 1: already had a battery of rays that would quote spread
Speaker 1: a curtain of death like the gas clouds of the
Speaker 1: recent war, such a cheery time. Yeah. And then soon
Speaker 1: after Russia also said, oh, they were like, we've got
Speaker 1: a death ray to One story in an Australian newspaper
Speaker 1: featured claims of a Russian ray weapon that could be
Speaker 1: used to melt lead or light cigarettes. That's it just
Speaker 1: all depends on where you just a nob to, right,
Speaker 1: I guess so. But yeah, anyway, so the story of
Speaker 1: Grendel Matthews is interesting because we ultimately don't know, I mean,
Speaker 1: clearly he was promising things that he could not deliver. Uh,
Speaker 1: Like we said, we don't know if it's all hoax
Speaker 1: or just mostly hoax or partially hoax or what. But
Speaker 1: obviously his his weapons were never put into use. They
Speaker 1: never became real, real death rays used by any of
Speaker 1: these the Allied forces. But he stayed in the press
Speaker 1: for you know, he kept showing up in articles by
Speaker 1: sympathetic journalists and stuff for years and years, and even
Speaker 1: by the time he became clear that nothing was going
Speaker 1: to really come with the death ray, he was still
Speaker 1: showing up. He was still inventing things or or you know,
Speaker 1: trying to find some spin on the technology. At least
Speaker 1: get his name out there. I was reading a two
Speaker 1: thousand nine Telegraph article titled Neglected Edwardian inventor made Death
Speaker 1: Ray and Uh. They pointed out that Warner Brothers employed
Speaker 1: him briefly in America to develop his talking picture process.
Speaker 1: This is the one he used to film. Uh. Uh.
Speaker 1: Ernest Shackleton a worth noting and stressing that he was
Speaker 1: not the only or the first inventor to pull off
Speaker 1: this effect. I think at some point he may have
Speaker 1: claimed he was the first. Yes, I think. I think
Speaker 1: it's claimed in that video. Actually, among other things. We
Speaker 1: didn't even get into all the claims that are made
Speaker 1: in that that short film in the Death Ray. Yeah,
Speaker 1: the Death Ray not really a video but short film. Yes. Um.
Speaker 1: So he comes back from America from working for Warner
Speaker 1: Brothers and in the nineteen thirties he he starts, uh,
Speaker 1: promoting the sky projector invention that you touched on earlier. Uh.
Speaker 1: And he even successfully cast the words Happy Christmas and
Speaker 1: a clock face into the clouds over Hampstead, England. Uh.
Speaker 1: This is from the Telegraph article, but it's by Steven Adams.
Speaker 1: He says, quote, while in America, he used film lighting
Speaker 1: equipment to create a high powered light projector thought by
Speaker 1: some to be the inspiration for the bat signal in
Speaker 1: the Batman cartoons. Yeah, so did Bob Kine say that
Speaker 1: or whoever? I don't know if I thought by some,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure, but I mean that the time frame
Speaker 1: would more or less workout. I guess. So he's projecting
Speaker 1: things into the sky and then we kind of get Batman.
Speaker 1: It's curious how all these these are connections. This is
Speaker 1: exactly what James Burke was talking about, you know, Robert,
Speaker 1: I think we're gonna have to call it there for
Speaker 1: the day. But the death ray has become such a
Speaker 1: richer and more interesting subject than I would have even imagined.
Speaker 1: I think we got a whole other episode worth of
Speaker 1: interesting death ray history and thoughts in us. Yeah, we
Speaker 1: didn't even get into Tesla. We're gonna have to save
Speaker 1: that for the next episode. Please join us again next
Speaker 1: time for more death ray goodness. In the meantime, if
Speaker 1: you want to check out more episodes of Invention, head
Speaker 1: on over to invention pod dot com. You can also
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Speaker 1: support the show. Huge thanks as always to our excellent
Speaker 1: audio producer, Tory Harrison. If you would like to get
Speaker 1: in touch with us directly to let us know feedback
Speaker 1: on this episode or any other, to suggest a topic
Speaker 1: for the future, or just to say hi, you can
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