My favorite scientist of all time was Nikola Tesla. He is the one that invented alternating current. The man was a genius and this became his undoing, when he worked for Edison. Edison was pushing direct current to light homes and Tesla was backing the more efficient AC. This angered Edison who fired him and then proceeded to humiliate him by trying to convince everyone that his alternating current was just too dangerous to use. He did this by using AC to develop an electric chair in which prisoners met a truly horrible death. Some took as long as four minutes to die and their heads went on fire. This didn't dismay Westinghouse from buying Tesla's patents for electrical generation and forming the first modern generating stations. Edison was a man that not only invented things on his own, but tried to perfect the inventions of others. Tesla was a guy with unique ideas that could revolutionize the world. An example of this, is that the Supreme Court overturned Marconi's wireless radio patent when it was proven that Tesla had invented it first. He had also invented an advanced submarine. Edison spent a lot of time trying to build a machine to contact the dead while Tesla was building the world's first death ray.

The machine for launching this ray was inside of a laboratory on Long Island, in New York. Behind the lab was a large metal tower. I have visited the area which is now abandoned and is a chemical spill site. It seems that when the lab was closed and the tower torn down, a photo developing company took the lab over and many years of disposing of chemicals has left the ground saturated. So how did this death ray work and was it ever fired up? It is said that Tesla figured out how to send an electrical ray into any spot on earth. The story goes that before World War II, he tried to convince the military that his ray was more powerful than an atom bomb because it could put more energy in a square inch of space than the bomb could. The military went with their nuclear program, but when Tesla died, a mysterious person went into his hotel room and took all his scientific papers. There is a place in Russia called Tunguska in Siberia, that is said to be where Tesla fired his ray at. Many scientists think a meteor or comet hit it. The damage was incredible, it was equal to at least 3,000 atom bombs being set off at once. If indeed this was caused by Tesla's electrical death ray, maybe it is a good thing that we don't have one.

In 1940 another scientist and inventor claimed that he had discovered a death ray. He stated that he was not trying to invent one, just the opposite as a matter of fact. He was trying to find a cure for cancer. He was using high frequency radiation in his tests, when he noticed that some of these rays had an extremely deadly effect. It is said that he went on to test the ray by shooting it over four miles at the wing of a plane that had pigeons on it and that the pigeons died instantly. The scientist was so upset at this, that he swore that he would never reveal the secret of his invention. Not only did he take the secret of his machine to his grave, he destroyed the machine itself. He said he had to do this for the good of mankind. Do we have any idea of how the machine worked? All we know is what he told us. He said that the blood in a body is made totally useless. Does this mean that the red cells were destroyed? Maybe. By the way, the radiation even penetrated thick metal walls.

In World War II, the Japanese were betting everything on a series of death ray machines. They were huge microwave generators that were going to be set up on the beaches of the home islands to fry any enemy troops that would try and invade the homeland. There was only one problem with this idea and it was a dilly. It turned out the the energy needed to power these things was more than could be generated on the entire planet.

The first death ray that was used is credited to Archimedes. His was a simple machine, polished shields that focused the sun's rays on invading Roman ships, setting them on fire. Tests have been conducted to see if this is actually possible and to the surprise of all, it worked. So the first death ray was merely a reflector of the sun's light, but it was concentrated so that it could produce heat, much as when we use a magnifying glass to increase the power of the sun's rays to burn something.

Gamma Ray Blast
Photo Source: NASA

Death rays exist in space and are from natural causes. For a time, scientists worried about the Earth being hit by a high energy gamma ray. This changed, when it was shown that the chances of this happening are very slim, so slim that they are close to zero. Well that is comforting, now we can get back to worrying about being hit by an asteroid. Some scientists believe that even if the universe is teeming with life, much of it gets destroyed by these gamma ray bursts before it has a chance to get fully developed. Taking this a step further, they think that could have already occurred in our own galaxy. Maybe there is some benefit to being located on the edge of an arm of a spiral galaxy after all. What happens to those places caught in a gamma ray burst? They are sterilized and all life is believed to be wiped out. Not a pleasant thought. Let's hope that we never figure out how to develop a gamma ray weapon that powerful.

Do we have a death ray today? I think that the answer to this question is not only that we do, but so do others. Both the U.S. and Russia deploy laser weapons, which are ray weapons and it is said that both might have particle beam weapons. The question here is can these weapons be miniaturized to the point where they become small enough and mobile enough for field use? As we all know, everything in electronics is shrinking, so I am sure that this is only a question of time. There is a claim that another type of death ray weapon was concealed in the nose of the Russian Hind helicopters when the Russians were in Afghanistan and when it was tested a smoke rocket was fired at the same time to hide the fact. It is said that death from the ray is instant because every living cell in the body dies in a split second. The bodies don't rot and are preserved even after 45 days. This weapon is known as a scalar EM pulse weapon and can knock out any armored vehicle including heavy tanks. It goes right through the armor.

AESA Radar In F-18
Photo Source: U.S. Navy

A rumor made its way around the governments of the world in 1934 that stated that the Nazis had invented a radar death ray. We know that this wasn't true, but now there is another rumor that just may be true and that is the the U.S. is developing a ray weapon from the an AESA radar system. This is a type of radar that doesn't move to scan an area, instead it has small components that transmit and receive. There are thousands of them. It is suspected that this type of radar might be able to be adopted to burn through the target. Here is the beauty part of it. The power of the radar rays increase as an inverse square as distance decreases.Put simply, the closer something gets to this radar weapon, the more destructive power is being put on the target. We are also developing microwave weapons for the same purpose. They put out more top power but less average power on a target. Lastly the new lasers are now down to a size that can be mounted on a truck. They are chemical lasers and it costs about $3,000 to fire one, making it much cheaper than a missile.

There is no doubt that the death ray is already here. It is not called a death ray, but as Shakespeare said, what is in a name?