Death rays
http://www.guardian.co.uk/life/farout/story/0,13028,1280882,00.html
Mark Pilkington
Thursday August 12, 2004
The Guardian
"A flaming death an invisible, inevitable sword of heat." So HG Wells
described the Martians ' heat ray in his 1898 classic The War of the
Worlds, one of the first novels to introduce the death ray into
popular consciousness.
The first historical accounts of this archetypal weapon of mass
destruction date to the Second Punic War, 218-202 BC. Defending the
city of Syracuse against a Roman assault, the Greek sage Archimedes is
said to have used a series of hexagonal mirrors (or bronze shields) to
focus sunlight into a searing beam that set the Romans' ships alight.
The incident was successfully reconstructed in 1973 by Dr Ioannis
Sakkas, who used 50 bronze-coated mirrors.
When it comes to 20th century death rays, two names feature
prominently: the Serbian inventor Nikola Tesla and an Englishman,
Harry Grindell Matthews.
Mark Pilkington
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=18510aff.0402200409.54721542%40posting.google.com
Nikola Tesla
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Nikola%20Tesla%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Nikola+Tesla%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Nikola+Tesla%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Nikola%20Tesla&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
Harry Grindell Matthews
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Harry+Grindell+Matthews%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&tab=nw&sa=N
http://news.google.com/news?q=%20%22Harry%20Grindell%20Matthews%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=gn
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Harry+Grindell+Matthews%22&num=100&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&output=search&cat=gwd/Top
http://groups.google.com/groups?as_epq=Harry%20Grindell%20Matthews&safe=images&ie=UTF-8&as_scoring=d&lr=&num=100&hl=en
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