"Death ray" .It is possible that this term sounds like science fiction, an unusual expression taken from movies like "Star Wars", but in reality it is something that goes beyond it, something as disturbing as it is dangerous if we put the war industry into context and its eagerness to enter new technologies.
The death ray was a concept developed by Nikola Tesla At the time, an idea that later took up a Spanish scientist based in the US in the mid-twentieth century.His intention was not at all to cause damage to humanity, quite the opposite.Political and social interests diverted their purpose to the point that this wise man was forced to destroy his own discovery for fear that he would fall into the wrong hands .A story that deserves to be remembered in our space.
The need for a new war weapon
Nikola Tesla came to affirm once that the First World War would be carried out through dust and explosives, while the following would be done through electricity .The truth is that the industries Belicas cared little for the means or forms, what the great superpowers have always longed for is to obtain powerful technologies, by means of which to destroy the greatest number of people and thus induce their own "fear" as a resource and warning weapon.
Tesla himself, in the wake of World War I, declared having found a perfect weapon.It was a particle beam with 60 million volts, a resource with which to disintegrate airplanes, weapons and millions of people.But beware, your idea was not at all to use it as an offensive weapon, on the contrary, from there to baptize it as "ray of peace". Your idea, as it appeared in the New York Herald Tribune, it was to create a barrier around the countries very similar to the Great Wall of China, in which no enemy soldiers, airplanes, or tanks could pass.It was just an idea that he had in mind, a project, something that I did not carry out because he died so unexpected in 1943.However, his investigations, diaries and drafts were immediately confiscated by the FBI.
The concept of" ray of peace "or" ray of death "was developed by other scientists such as Harry Grindell-Matthews, who tried to sell, without success, a mock-up of his idea to the UK Air Ministry in 1924, or Edwin R.Scott , an inventor of San Francisco, who said he invented a death ray that disintegrated living beings at a distance and that shot down planes, was never demonstrated.In fact, only a glimpse of these possibilities was obtained with the i Antonio Longoria .
Nikola TeslaThe invention of Antonio Longoria
After the First World War the world lost Innocence.The world opened its eyes, aware of the darkness of the human being and its evil, and at the same time new hopes and new concepts were ignited.We were in 1934, the year in which children began to play with ray guns cosmic rays capable of paralyzing and disintegrating people, just like Alex Raymond's vineyards with his hero Flash Gordon .
It was precisely that same year when several magazines of science and technology echo fabulous news.In «Popular Science», for example, and on page 117 there was talk of what a doctor based in Cleveland and named Antonio Longoria had discovered:
“A weapon with which, the pigeons fall dead instantly while flying by the action of a few rays peace of reaching them at a distance of four miles.This is the achievement that, supposedly, Dr.Antonio Longoria, of Cleveland, Ohio, has in turn been destroyed by the same for considering it lethal and for threatening humanity itself ”.
A disconcerting fact, no doubt.The world received that news with a mixture of strangeness and restlessness.The Reading Eagle, of Pennsylvania, for example, spoke of the great possibilities for the army to be able to have a weapon with such possibilities.According to the article itself «The new ray of death was so powerful that with it an entire army could be destroyed.The United States, then, would be saved from any invasion by that ray and in a few seconds, from a distance only limited by the curvature of the Earth.»
But what did the supposed « ray of the Death of Longoria »? That impact of particles made the blood suddenly acquire a consistency and a color similar to that of glycerin, destroying all red blood cells.Simply, terrifying.There was no government that He would not be interested in this supposed weapon, but no one could do with his project.When Longoria was aware of what he had developed and the applications that were going to be made of his discovery, I do not doubt it: he destroyed the machine and all the papers where the methodology was developed.Antonio Longoria was a humanist, in a lesson in ethics and integrity he rushed to turn any trace of his "death ray" to ashes.
As curious fact and finally, in the epitaph of the tomb of this scientist of Spanish origin the following phrase appears: "They said it could not be done.He did it."
Image: Romain Guy
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