In 1934, for instance, inventor Nikola Tesla - instrumental in developing the alternating-current electricity system - announced that he had attempted to design a device that would send a ‘death beam’ of concentrated particles to detect and destroy submarines. Hecht, a science writer who has covered lasers since the 1970s, instead records efforts to adapt the technology for military use. And that’s the story told in Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon.Īs the title indicates, Jeff Hecht’s book is not about the mundane, ubiquitous lasers of supermarket checkouts and CD players. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds to the Star Wars franchise.Īs often happens, futurist fiction sparked the real thing. Millennia later, ‘death rays’ - concentrated light or electricity - became a science-fiction trope, from H.

In the third century bc, for instance, Greek scientist Archimedes allegedly used mirrors reflecting the Sun’s rays to attack Roman ships off Sicily. Lasers first emerged nearly 60 years ago, but the idea of using powerful beams of heat or light is hardly new. Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon Jeff Hecht Prometheus (2019)

Credit: Nicholas Violoa/Infoscitex/USAFRL The Roman fleet burns like matchsticks.An artist’s impression of a high-energy laser in use on a US Airforce fighter jet. Several times larger than the tiny figures at its base, the mirror shoots off blinding rays that strike the viewer as much as the ships in modern 3-D this effect would have audiences leaping out of their seats. In no time he directs the construction of a gigantic mirror array, neither hinged nor apparently focusable, an odd omission from a filmmaker. A simple grid of mirrors reflecting the sun causes a piece of paper to be set on fire. Desperate to stave off the Roman battle fleet, Archimedes putters in his workshop until inspiration strikes. Giovanni Pastrone’s Italian epic Cabiria, released at lengths from two to three hours in 1914, contained a five-minute scene featuring the ancient Archimedes called into the losing battle against the Romans at the end of second Punic War, shown below. By the twelfth century Tzetzes of Byzantium, no relation to the fly, had a complete narrative at his fingers.Īrchimedes constructed a kind of hexagonal mirror, and at an interval proportionate to the size of the mirror, he set similar small mirrors with four edges, moving by links and by a kind of hinge, and made the glass the centre of the sun’s beams … So after that, when the beams were reflected into this, a terrible kindling of flame arose upon the ships, and he reduced them to ashes a bow-shot off ( Chiliades, 2.109-123). Later authors embellished this bare detail not confirmed by any contemporary until a small miracle of ingenuity emerged as a set story. The always unreliable fantasist and satirist Lucian of Samosota credited Archimedes with the power to set ships afire. The first weapon to capture this dream appears to be Archimedes’ heat ray. From classical times, the dream weapon discarded the mundane physical intermediary. Other projectile weapons had similar limitations.

Worse, a thrown spear could be tossed back at you.

Spears were heavy and could only be thrown once. Each of these weapons had a potentially fatal flaw. Action at a distance – the separation of soldier from target – can be pushed back as far as the first monkey throwing the first rock and taken through a logical course from spears to arrows to catapults to muskets and rifles. Death rays were popular throughout the 20th century, but their conceit goes much farther back.

Archimedes mirror weapon