Laser

Dreaming of death rays: the search for laser weapons

Lasers first emerged nearly 60 years ago, but the idea of using powerful beams of heat or light is hardly new. In the third century bc, for instance, Greek scientist Archimedes allegedly used mirrors reflecting the Sun’s rays to attack Roman ships off Sicily. Millennia later, ‘death rays’ — concentrated light or electricity — became a science-fiction trope, from H. G. Wells’s 1898 The War of the Worlds to the Star Wars franchise.

As often happens, futurist fiction sparked the real thing. And that’s the story told in Lasers, Death Rays, and the Long, Strange Quest for the Ultimate Weapon.

As the title indicates, Jeff Hecht’s book is not about the mundane, ubiquitous lasers of supermarket checkouts and CD players. Hecht, a science writer who has covered lasers since the 1970s, instead records efforts to adapt the technology for military use. In 1934, for instance, inventor Nikola Tesla — instrumental in developing the alternating-current electricity system — announced that he had attempted to design a device that would send a ‘death beam’ of concentrated particles to detect and destroy submarines. As Hecht relates, US government agents looked into the proposal after Tesla’s death, but reviewer John G. Trump, an electrical engineer (and uncle of the current US president), declared it too speculative.