People love to get scared. Safely. They love haunted houses and roller coasters. They love vampires, and werewolves, and hordes of zombies. They can't enough of real world horrors either, as long as they're unlikely or happening to someone else far away. Murders and plane crashes and ebola. The Rapture and Y2K and nuclear winter.

 

Or, as in 1924, Death Rays.

 

24/7 news coverage had yet to be invented, but for a few months newspapers and magazines made a thick spread of the few facts available, expressed mainly in blaring headlines and hysterical editorials of the latest, greatest, ultimate, civilization-dooming but maybe weak, useless, or downright fake wonder of modern technology. Major newspapers like The New York Times devoted dozens of articles to Death Rays but no one in the smallest towns could escape the horror thanks to the many syndicators of news and photos like the Associated Press and the International News Service. Time magazine, then only a year old but already gaining a reputation as the go-to source for short pieces on major topics, devoted three articles to rays in 1924 and revisited it the next year. The pop-sci magazines marveled about it but so did magazines from The Rotarian to The Indian Review to The Sketch: A Journal of Art and Actuality to Railway Carmen's Journal and The Messenger of Peace. You couldn't escape it. And that, after all, is the point of a Death Ray.

 

Let Time, the prime summarizer, set the scene, from its April 21 article titled "Invisible Death." (All dates are 1924 unless indicated.)

 

H. Grindell-Matthews, inventor of a method of controlling motorboats at sea by wireless, for which the British Government awarded him $125,000, has perfected a principle by which airplane or other engines can be stopped in full operation through an invisible ray. He has demonstrated its efficacy with but a quarter kilowatt of power on engines in the laboratory, and needs only to strengthen its current for operation at a greater distance to bring airplanes in flight to a full stop and send them crashing to earth. No insulation is proof against this weapon, for if the carburetor were sufficiently protected, the ray could be so intensified as to set the wing fabric afire. Said he: "I believe that in the near future machine guns will be found only in museums."

 

Harry Grindell Matthews had no hyphen in his name, but that's okay since his name wasn't Harry Grindell Matthews either. In 1916, he had it legally changed to Harry Grindell Grindell, a name he never used again except when forced to by his many court cases. Eccentric? To a fault. A real inventor? Absolutely. He was a pioneer in radio telephony and created a sound-on-film process that later got him hired by the Warner Brothers in Hollywood. The British government took him very seriously, except when they were denouncing him as a fraud while simultaneously warning against selling his inventions to foreign powers. Their investigations of his claim were so prejudiced, bungled, and contradictory that whatever truth lay behind them couldn't possibly emerge. Only headlines.

 

ELECTRIC RAY CAN PARALYZE ARMY, CLAIM

Grindell Matthews Tells of Possibilities of His Latest Invention

CAN CONTROL ITS POWER

Briton, In Interview, Gives Details of His Invisible "Ray of Destruction"

 

You hardly needed to read the article in those days; the headlines, plural, told you all you needed to know. Still, those details from Matthews must have popped any eyes who bothered to read on.

 

My ray can create an atmosphere in which nothing can exist, which will ignite anything inflammable or explosive and even[,] with sufficient electrical energy, melt metal or even glass....

 

It is an invisible power as destructive as a flash of lightning - a ray of light along which an electric current travels which is constant and controllable. My invention is purely a weapon of warfare, both from an offensive and defensive point of view. ...

 

In future air raids electric rays will sweep the skies instead of searchlights. That means that any aeroplane or Zeppelin coming within the barrage would be brought down much more effectively than by machine gun fire. ...

 

But while it is essentially a war weapon, at the same time it can be made a weapon of peace, inasmuch as if expectations are realized, war will become unthinkable, as a power that had warlike intentions would hesitate before embarking on war with a country whose strength in "invisible" armament was known.

 

Not a word of this was true. Should that matter? Every inventor hyped his [always his; I know of no counterexamples from this era] new marvel beyond any possible technological reality. Matthews made these claims almost simultaneously with WWI ace of aces Captain Eddie Rickenbacker talking of the inevitable future of "Flying Autos Within 20 Years." Did he believe himself is the better question, and that's unanswerable. He operated on a shoestring budget at all times - that $125,000 from the British government Time mentioned was awarded days before the war ended when war funds instantly evaporated. Since then he had been in a constant search for wealthy backers, most of whom had at one time or another learned to their financial cost that any claim from any inventor had to be reduced by 99% to conform to current reality. Of course Matthews was hyping the product. But what if...