OK, I’m just sitting there, minding my own business, reading Jim Steinmeyer’s book, Hiding the Elephant: How Magicians Invented the Impossible and Learned to Disappear, when suddenly I come upon Biff, the disappearing motorcycle, an illusion by the great British magician, David Devant.
And how did Devant make this plausible to the audience?
No exact date is given, but from context Biff appears to have been introduced between 1912 and 1914, when the motorcycle was a nifty, new, high-tech doodad. The headlines about “death rays” should also narrow down the time.
Anyone with access to British newspapers of the day?
The most likely date is 1924-25. The “Death Ray” flap of the period appears to have been launched by a British experimenter named Henry Grindell-Matthews, who claimed to have invented such a device in 1924.
Here’s a blurb on this curious character; while something of a charlatan (certainly where the death ray was concerned), he also was legitimately responsible for the development of some interesting devices, including a means of projecting huge images onto clouds.
Grindell-Matthews also was the subject of a major article in the September 2003 issue of Fortean Times magazine (FT174).
El_Kabong, the problem with Grindell-Matthews is that Devant retired in 1919 because of illness. We need an earlier death ray.
Miller, did Tesla actually claim this at the time? I thought only his nutcase acolytes made these claims at a much later date. (And before we go any further - no, it’s not true in any case as your link makes very clear.)
In fact, here’s a believer’s link that actually compares Grindell-Matthews and Tesla. But I don’t see anywhere in there that Tesla ever made the claim for himself.
Wasn’t there a thread started about this death-ray topic a little while ago? I can barely remember it because it faded into obscurity due to little or no interest in the subject.
I think he did. Hard to say, since googling “Tesla death ray” yields a very high loon ratio. And, of course, the non-loon cites don’t tend to devote a lot of attention to the death ray-related areas of Tesla’s research.
Here is a cite that has a scan of a newspaper clipping where Tesla tells a reporter about using his death ray on enemy airplanes, but it is dated 1940. And it comes from a site called “UFOReview,” which pretty much puts a stake through the heart of its credibility in general.
This cite supports the idea that Tesla thought he had cuased the Tungeska explosion, and looks a lot less sketchy than the previous cite, but it’s a tech site, not a history site, and might be repeating rumors from other sources. Plus, they end with a “Conspiracy or not? You decide!” tag, which is a bit sensationalistic.
However, most interesting of all is this
site, which looks a bit fringey, but mentions that, “In 1924 a plethora of “death ray” and “anti-aircraft ray” stories appeared in the New York Times.” And cites further such stories in the Australian press. No mention of Tesla’s thoughts on Tunguska, but it does (miracle of miracles) actually have something to do with the OP. Unfortunetly, it also has banner ads for books about crop circles, and ends with speculation that the Aum Shinrikyo cult was able to duplicate Tesla’s research and create fireballs in some place called Banjawarn.
I have been waiting patiently for someone on this board to ask why fans of science fiction in general and Spider Robinson’s work in particular have been so vocal in panning Callahan’s Key.
