I n the spring of 1924, Harry Grindell Matthews sat before a ticking, whirring motion picture camera. Handsome, polished, and poised, he examined an electrical component, scribbled notes on his desk, and looked thoughtfully into the distance. But his cool, competent demeanor in this newsreel belied what was really going on: His career was at stake.
A Welsh inventor with a record of triumphs that had never quite brought him monetary success or household-name status, Grindell Matthews believed he was now on the cusp of greatness. This short, sepia-toned newsreel, on which he’d probably spent his initial investors’ last penny, was supposed to finally secure government backing for his ultimate invention. In it, a cannon, perhaps five feet in diameter but stumpy and covered with odd protrusions, swivels on a mount. Across the scene, smoke billows from the fiery devastation of an unseen army or defenses. Amid the smoke, the reel shows a group of gunners in leather jackets, dwarfed by the large gun. One peers through binoculars at the next target, and the gun’s operator, watching through an observation slit, aims the weapon and unleashes its full power on its next objective. The film cuts to a city in flames.
Grindell Matthews had already sold one invention, a light-activated remote control, to the British Navy. But the new technology shown in the film was unlike any other. This was no ordinary cannon—it was a death ray. Just six years earlier, the First World War had finally ended after decimating a generation and scarring Europe. Its memories were fresh: The mechanized carnage had ground bodies under shell and tank tread; the introduction of gas warfare had claimed over 90,000 lives. And yet this new weapon would be even more destructive. It could make planes fall from the sky, torch a city, and boil adversaries from the inside out with one sweep of the turret.
And in 1924, Harry Grindell Matthews was ready to demonstrate this power to the British government. Or so he hoped.
The path to the death ray’s dramatic exhibition began about 20 years earlier in Bexhill-on-Sea, a small coastal village south of London. In 1902, 22-year-old Grindell Matthews had returned home from Africa to recover from two wounds he’d acquired in the recently concluded Boer War. As he regained strength, he was eager to resume his career as an electrical engineer. More than anything, it seemed, he wanted to make his mark on wireless communication, the technological revolution of his day.
The field was exploding and successful inventors were being hailed as heroes. By the late nineteenth century, Nikola Tesla had strung success after success. Building off emerging theories about energy radiating in waves, he invented a high-voltage power generator (today known as a Tesla coil), hoping to transmit electricity wirelessly. His invention caused a kind of spark in a receiver at a distance—in effect, his pioneering concepts gave birth to the fundamental components of radios. Realizing he could use the same electrical broadcasts to switch on and off small motors, he remotely controlled a small boat in 1898.
Meanwhile, in 1899, Guglielmo Marconi, working for the British government, sent Morse code wirelessly between Royal Navy ships, proving the feasibility of wireless transmission. Two years after that, he sent a signal across the Atlantic. In 1900, Reginald Fessenden became the first inventor to broadcast the human voice. Great newspaper fanfare heralded most of these feats.
Young Grindell Matthews had catching up to do. He was precocious, having mastered technical college and an electrical apprenticeship in a rush before his deployment; he was good-looking and charming, which made him popular. These traits helped him win the friendship of Gilbert Sackville, an aristocratic newspaper correspondent during the war who now provided the recovering veteran modest support for a small lab and radio equipment. Grindell Matthews focused on transmitting the human voice, a more difficult task than sending mere clicks and chirps of Morse code like Marconi did in those years. He strived to perfect ship-to-shore communication, and after seven years of experimentation, he had struck on a compact device that could reliably send his voice to a boat as far as seven miles away.
From that point, Grindell Matthews largely focused on military applications for his inventions, likely hoping to repeat Marconi’s success in outfitting the Royal Navy with radios. He turned to aviation, developing technology that allowed someone on the ground to speak with a pilot flying seven hundred feet in the air. Then he created a remote-controlled blimp, which he demonstrated by flying it around an auditorium to delighted onlookers.
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Although his inventions weren’t groundbreaking—these military technologies had already been pioneered in other countries—Grindell Matthews had found his niche. By 1910, the charismatic inventor had become a darling of the British press. They covered him closely and positioned him as one of the United Kingdom’s scientific champions.
Intrigued by the engineer’s successes, in 1911 the War Office asked him to demonstrate his wireless phone by communicating between distant rooms of the Army headquarters in Aldershot. If it worked, the Army might buy hundreds of his wireless phone boxes, bringing him the fame and financial success of inventors like Marconi. Grindell Matthews, however, had some conditions: He requested that a reporter accompany him to the trial but also that no government engineers observe, since he had not yet received a patent on the device.
On the day of the test, Grindell Matthews and his two assistants set up the radios but initially struggled to establish a connection. As they troubleshot the issue, Grindell Matthews saw an Army observer making notes and sketches. The inventor was incensed, accusing the man of stealing his technology for the government. He stormed away with his radio boxes, cutting short the demonstration.
Although his reputation with the British government was damaged, his confidence kept growing, and Grindell Matthews made bolder and bolder claims about the distance he could transmit a voice. In 1912, a reporter for the Daily Express dared Grindell Matthews to send him a message from the Welsh border to London, a distance of 110 miles. On the night of the trial, London was buffered with wild wind and snow squalls. The reporter entered a small room in the city’s northeast where Grindell Matthews had placed the radio receiver and told the lab assistant that he believed the blizzard would undoubtedly foil the attempt. But when the time came, the inventor’s words cut through the snow and wind from more than 100 miles away. Not content to transmit only his voice, the inventor then played his favorite phonograph, a song called “Two Eyes of Grey,” for his listeners in London. “I’ve got a story about history being made and I’ve got the job of helping to write it,” the reporter said, dashing out into the storm to go publish his story.
More articles followed. One declared his radio receiver “an instrument which annihilates space.” Another, in Australia’s Adelaide Register, proclaimed that “sooner than we think . . . anybody carrying a small instrument in his pocket . . . will communicate anywhere or at any time with a friend at a distance.” That prescient piece of journalism seemed to predict the invention of the cellphone almost a hundred years before its arrival.
After news about this radiotelephone reached Buckingham Palace, the royal family requested a personal demonstration. On a summer day in 1912, Grindell Matthews arrived and rigged radio masts on two of the family’s most luxurious cars, which he then positioned at opposite ends of the palace grounds. The teenage princes Edward and George sat in one car and spoke with their mother, who was in the other. Their voices were as clear as if they were speaking through a telephone. Queen Mary seemed most pleased with the mobile radio phone. “It was a matter of some difficulty, indeed, to persuade them to ‘ring off,’” proclaimed one news story.
Grindell Matthews kept striving for the technology that would put him ahead of the curve. In 1914, he successfully demonstrated a remote-activated boat controlled by a light beam, and although the military paid him £25,000 for the technology (about $3.1 million today), the invention meant to help tackle bombing raids was never utilized. As the First World War engulfed Europe, Grindell Matthews turned his attention to detecting German submarines, which were wreaking havoc in the Atlantic. He proposed laying a network of undersea cables to form a sort of electric net that could detect the magnetic field created by a submarine’s spinning motors. He boldly told the Royal Navy that he’d perfected submarine detection. Wary but desperate, the government gave Grindell Matthews another shot in 1917. But once again, his invention failed. Other unsuccessful demonstrations followed, putting the would-be pioneer out of money. Investors were pounding at his door. The young inventor must have felt like he was falling further behind his peers—Fessenden had invented sonar devices in 1914, already in use by the United States. Grindell Matthews needed a break, and it would come from an unlikely source: science fiction.
Death rays had a grip on the public imagination from the turn of the twentieth century. The Martian tripods in H.G. Wells’s 1898 novel War of the Worlds sported weapons that shot invisible heat rays. In the 1910s, silent movie villains reduced their enemies to “heaps of bones” using “F-rays,” “X-ray guns,” and a wide assortment of death rays. Even Popular Mechanics reported on the technology, predicting in 1923 that in future wars, “heat generated wirelessly will shoot out unseen over wide areas, destroying all life without warning.” Rumor swirled that Tesla actually possessed such a device.
Could Grindell Matthews take all he learned about wireless communication and create a weapon that harnessed energy—a precursor to the powerful lasers of today? It wasn’t too far-fetched. One of the creators of the tank, General Ernest Swinton, said in 1921 that “we may not be so very far from the development of some kinds of lethal ray which will shrivel up . . . human beings.”
Some believed a weapon like that already existed. In 1924, several French commercial planes made emergency landings after experiencing engine trouble over southern Germany. The Literary Digest proclaimed that the Germans were experimenting with a ray gun that could seize planes’ engines. The rumor caused panic in Britain, and the press turned to Grindell Matthews for an explanation.
At the time, the inventor was trying to perfect one of Tesla’s old ideas: delivering power wirelessly over a beam of energy. He’d made progress. His device could short-circuit a spark plug or heat a target. So when reporters asked him about Germany’s mysterious ray gun, Grindell Matthews seized the opportunity to promote his own work. He told a Daily Mail reporter he had already invented a similar device and, yes, his could bring down a plane—or worse. The press seized on the story, and once again Grindell Matthews was a sensation; his London workshop was essentially besieged by journalists trying to force their way into his lab. The papers named him “the Death Ray Man.”
Even Grindell Matthews’s biographer, fiercest defender, and former assistant, Ernest H. G. Barwell, admitted that the engineer was in over his head. But short on funds, Grindell Matthews used his notoriety to raise money. He formed a new company, selling shares to those hoping to profit from the ray gun. Confident in his abilities, Grindell Matthews attempted to hurriedly improve his energy director into a weapon of war and secure another lucrative government payment.
In the spring of 1924, the British military, despite its distaste for Grindell Matthews, asked for a demonstration. He immediately agreed; this was his chance. When the day came, observers from each of Britain’s armed services wanted to see the show. His small lab was located in an elegant red brick building in an affluent corner of West London. There the suave inventor, in a white lab coat and neat tie, greeted them with his usual charm before showing them a ray gun: a canister about four feet long, roughly 20 inches in diameter, with a few stunted appendages.
At the beginning of the demonstration, Grindell Matthews remotely illuminated a neon light bulb held by one of the government agents, since the ray, at its lowest setting, was supposed to conduct power through the air. Then Grindell Matthews directed the gun at a small engine, which caused it to shut down. Officials asked Grindell Matthews to move the engine farther away from the “gun,” but the inventor grew impatient and said there was no time; he had other demonstrations to perform that day.
What technology Grindell Matthews developed isn’t clear, but he seems to have generated a strong electromagnetic field that either excited the gas in the bulb or created a current in a receiving coil in the bulb. A strong field, too, would interfere with the sparking of a small engine’s spark plugs, causing it to malfunction. It does seem that he could direct the radiation—so it’s possible that he created a cavity magnetron, which would have focused a stream of microwave energy.
Despite witnessing a successful demonstration that the device could harness some energy, the government officials seemed unimpressed. One recorded that he was “rather surprised to find that the inventor should imagine that one would be impressed” by what Nikola Tesla had done 20 years prior. And when another representative offered Grindell Matthews £1,000 (approximately $65,000 today) to repeat the demonstration at a government facility, he declined; he claimed he already had investors in France clamoring for his invention. (Whether he actually did or was just trying to secure a grant to fund his work is unclear.) Rejected again, and even mocked by some members of Parliament, Grindell Matthews did try to sell his invention in France. He later claimed to have sold the technology in the U.S., but a deal never materialized.
In a last-ditch effort to raise money and find a possible buyer for his yet unfinished weapon, Grindell Matthews sold the movie rights to a fictional demonstration of the ray gun he hoped to perfect one day.
The silent movie shows Grindell Matthews looking professional in his white lab coat over a suit. But the ray gun he operates looks as fantastic as anything in sci-fi, a far cry from the small apparatus he had shown in his London workshop. The smoke drifting over the scene of the large ray cannon is there for dramatic effect, as is the spliced-in newsreel footage of the city in flames. Was it all a hoax, or an act of a broke inventor desperate for the money he needed to sustain his work? William J. Fanning, Jr., author of Death Rays and the Popular Media, wrote on the superscience crazes of Grindell Matthews’s day that “most mainstream scientists concluded that his claim was at best bad science and at worst a hoax.”
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Today, directed-energy weapons are used by the United States and other militaries to shoot down small drones. But the technology is still in its infancy, and no nation has figured out how to harness the energy needed to make them powerful enough to replace missiles and cannons. That’s not a new problem. One hundred years ago, Marconi and Tesla abandoned their own attempts to create directed-energy weapons for the same reason. It’d take “all the energy of New York City” to project a death ray capable of killing a man at 20 miles, Tesla said. Given the resources available to him at the time, Grindell Matthews likely ran into the same problem. Despite promising early successes, he couldn’t summon enough energy to cheat physics. And yet, did his dreaming—or scheming—inspire a technology that truly helped end a war?
Despite the barriers to producing significant directed-energy systems at the time, the inventors weren’t far off. Their work laid the foundation for a future of cellphones, WiFi, and lasers. Indeed, it appears Grindell Matthews’s efforts were a catalyst too. One of the government observers at his demonstration—the one who held the neon bulb, unimpressed—was an engineer named Harry Wimperis, the science research director for the Royal Air Force, who eventually helped develop a radar system that was inspired by Grindell Matthews’s attempt to create a ray gun that could shoot down planes. If energy couldn’t destroy them, maybe it could at least detect them. And radar’s role in the victorious Battle of Britain during the Second World War is inestimable.