Inventing a Ray Gun Using Matthews Rays, Feb. 8, 1926

When I was little, I listened to Flash Gordon on the radio, and I thought what I was hearing was actually happening. So when I came across this newspaper article from 100 years ago, I immediately thought of ray guns:

Claims Invention Can Destroy Planes by Powerful Heat

Leningrad, Russia, Feb. 7—Prof. A.N. Boyka of the Russian magnetic observatory announces the invention of an apparatus which by means of the reflections of powerful rays of heat, will destroy airplanes or dirigibles in flight. His appliance, he says, will project concentrated heat waves 25 miles, with loss of only one-third of their strength. His invention, he says, put the mysterious “Matthews rays” in the backgrounds and he intends to offer it to the red army.

From the front page of The Concord Daily Tribune, Monday, Feb. 8, 1926

newspapers.digitalnc.org/lccn/sn92073201/1926-02-08/ed-1/seq-1/

Of course, I know ray guns don’t exist, or at least they haven’t been invented yet. But what was the research being done with Mathews rays at a Russian magnetic observatory 100 years ago? I admit I never took physics in high school, but I have seen diagrams of the electromagnetic spectrum and there is nothing labeled “Matthew rays” on it.

I asked my go-to researcher, the AI Copilot, about the article, Matthew rays and the Russian scientist A.N. Boyka. Here’s a summary of his response:

In the mid 1920s, an American inventor named T. Henry Matthews claimed he had developed a beam that could stop automobile engines, bring down airplanes, kill small animals instantly, and transmit energy wirelessly.

He called it a “ray” or “vibratory energy beam.” He never demonstrated it under controlled conditions, never produced a working device, and never published a technical description. Scientists of the time dismissed it as impossible, but newspapers printed it because “death ray” stories sold papers.

So when your 1926 article says Boyka’s invention “puts the mysterious Matthews rays in the background,” it’s referencing a well known sensational claim of the day. People in the 1920s were fascinated by X rays, radio, infrared, and early radar experiments, but they didn’t yet have a clear sense of what was physically possible. ‘Heat rays’ were often imagined as a kind of super intense infrared beam—something we still can’t project over long distances with destructive power.

There’s no record in scientific literature of an A.N. Boyka producing a real device. Most likely he was experimenting with mirrors or reflectors for concentrating heat (like solar furnaces).

People believed new invisible forces were being discovered every year. The idea of a “ray weapon” felt plausible, even inevitable.

Flash Gordon debuted in 1934, right at the peak of the public’s obsession with Matthews rays, heat rays, magnetic rays, disintegrator beams, electric guns, and “death rays” supposedly invented in Russia, Britain, and the U.S. When Alex Raymond created Flash Gordon, he pulled directly from this cultural stew. The “death ray” was already a familiar trope, and audiences expected it.

Thanks, Copilot!

So back to the Flash Gordon radio serials programs the radio delivered to our home, Ming the Merciless and other villains used things like death rays, disintegrator beams, heat projectors, paralyzing rays and invisible rays against Flash Gordon. And these weapons were the basis for Buck Rogers’ atomic pistols, early Superman villains’ ray machines, Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, and eventually Star Trek phasers and Star Wars blasters.

And if these weapons never panned out, remember that science was researching another type of atomic weapon, one based on the radioactivity discovered by Becquerel in 1896.

Radioactive decay released energy. What if we could learn how to trigger this energy release on demand? You’d have a new type of explosive. This was all theory, all basic research, until nuclear fission was discovered in 1938. Then a bomb was theoretically possible. The U.S. formed its “Uranium Committee,” the British the “MAUD Committee,” and Germany the Uranverein (Uranium Club). And in 1942 The Manhattan Project was begun.

And today, if you take one of those atomic weapons and explode it in the atmosphere, it will send out an electromagnetic pulse that will “fry” computers, bringing down airplanes and stopping car engines that depend on computers.