Gizmodo
For this week's retromodo installation, we're looking at the Death Ray Machine, (awesome name). Apparently, the device was put together by a Cleveland scientist, and its abilities were only showcased in a one time display to members of the National Inventors' Congress at Omaha, Nebraska. The Death Ray Machine was witnessed to instantly kill dogs, cats and rabbits once its beam shone on them.
Blood was reported to spill from the deceased, unfortunate test animals, but it was instantly turned to water. Blood to water—not even Jesus could do that. The officials that attended were so in awe of the dazzling power, they prevented any further development until the Death Ray Machine could be put to a useful, defensive purpose by the government. No one knows what became of the Death Ray Machine, but we think it just may be the scariest vaporware ever. [Modern Mechanix via Boing Boing]
Comments
AVADA KEDAVRA!
Wow. That's scary.
So what was the beam? EM?
It's probably in that warehouse with the Ark.
@cubensis: It was a beam of awesome.
Blah show me the rainbow :) Oh no am I dead?
Yeah, but could it blend? (bad joke)
Brutality
damn it, I really wanted to taste the rainbow!
The guy in the photo looks a bit nerdy to create such a terrifying machine.
Na. If it was real, they would have killed everyone with it by now.
Somehow I doubt it ever was true. Like Magnoliaboy said, they would've used it by now, or someone would've rediscovered it.
You might be surprised how much propaganda and misinformation we've fed to the world during war time. I agree with the last couple of posts - if we had, we'd have used it - plenty of opportunity.
However, I don't think it would take much to boil you in your skin which of course would result in blood everywhere (not at all sure about that blood-to-water thing).
Oh, and exactly what sort of omniscience do you have to claim that Jesus could not have changed blood to water? Since blood is about 83% water, it seems like quite an easy feat frankly (certainly for the one who created it in the first place or don't you read your bible)?
@IrisMR:
The NSA developed it into a small handheld weapon and is waiting until someone decides to try to invade the US to use it.
(jk)
sweet! so in case domestic pets turn on humans and there's a water famine we know exactly where to turn. I love having strategies like this in place
A machine that kills animals, causing blood to pour from them - sounds like a gun if you ask me...
Hoax.
Fortunately I'm an electrical engineer and can shed some radiation on this. The dude is holding an old style x-ray tube, probably from the early 1900's maybe through 1920 or so. I kind of doubt those tubes had enough output power to "instantly" kill small animals as quickly as a modern microwave oven might do. But I suppose it might be able to do some serious damage in a few minutes. Not something I want to contemplate the next time I visit the dentist and wonder if they've properly calibrated their x-ray machine.
great especially since we've been having water shortages, let's use in the Iraq get the oil and the water. Kill two birds with one stone.
Actually it was a distallite (sp?) of Young Chuck Norris. That explains why no other power in existence could compare. Chuck Norris... lethal even when distilled and turned into beam energy!
@sqeakytoy of the apocalypse: dang, shorty, thats some dark humor. but i like the way you think haha.
It concentrates Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion Field-- animals are transformed into Apple fanatics that wet themselves to death. I know this to be true, because I'm still mopping up after myself...
@huygir: Frankly, I do read my bible.
Jesus did not create blood, or humanity.
It was supposedly God, g-d, G-d, E.
Jesus was a sword to bring brother against father, etc, etc, and was a prophet until declared otherwise.
Also, shush your religinut face. This is a technology site.
Actually, Jesus did do blood to water, when the Roman soldier pierced Jesus' side with a spear. It's in one of the gospels that a mixture of blood and water came out (I'm paraphrasing).
He did not, however, at least so far as I know, have a frickin' laser beam, so you're still sorta right.
(of all the Gizmodo headlines I've ever read, this was the one that most made me go, "Um. Zuh?")
Atually we've been using the "death ray" for decades. I personally used both the hand held version, and the BFG version on Mars in the Martian/Earth war of 1960. But unfortunetly we had to abandon that design during the Alteran/Earth war of 1984. You see, the Alterans were completly immune to the effects of the "death ray". In fact the only weapons that had any effect against them were the ones reverse engineered from Orion tech. Unfortunetly affective arms against the Alterans came to late, and we had to surrender in 1990. And to this day we are under Alteran rule. Just goes to show, whether it's bad leaders or alien overseers, it the same old shit, different day.
The trick to peace is not reading your bible. It is reading the other mans bible.
Jesus coulda done this ... with photoshop. No sweat.
[gizmodo.com]
@Kendra: Then apparently you fail to comprehend what you read. As for Giz being a technology site I fully agree... I did not bring up the subject of Jesus - Haroon did.
But guys, you have to remember, Jesus wasn't/isn't real.
Yes he is. What's more, you can talk to him.
jesus@gizmodo.com
@FranklinTurtle: but Dracula was.
Ahhh those pre-PETA days....
Ahhh...those pre-PETA days...
Fact is that none of us should really be arguing. I'm just glad Jesus chose to turn water into WINE. The other way around is just plain idiocy. My 2 cents worth
Nice to see something like this that isn't associated with Tesla.
@jkr: I lost a brother in the Alteran/Earth War. Someone planted a bomb on his Delorean as he was about to go back in time to warn us about the futile death rays....
stop protesters in a way that rubber bullets and tear gas just can't!
I wondered about the many dead pets laying around...
seems that not only is this reverse-jesus machine real, we have nothing better to do with a death ray than avenge our front lawns... ;)
I've seen a gamma ray machine at UCSD which had enough power to melt lead. But turn matter into water? I don't think so.
mythbusters anyone?
It looks a little like an early cyclotron.
@jbhitter24:
damn, right when I was thinking of a way to challenge the team
double dare to try it on a real doggy/kitty/Grant (since I could easily take his place)
har har
We have here two X-ray tubes and a Tesla coil. I'm sure they could do a fair bit of killing, but it probably wouldn't be instantaneous. Similar x-ray tubes and medical coils can be seen at [thebakken.org] in the artifacts database.
I saw an episode of FutureWeapons of a defensive system that creates a pain field by heating the water in the skin. Fortunately, it's calibrated to only penetrate a few millimeters (so far).
oh yeah, my bads
Forget the death ray, dropping the machine on a rabbit would be just as effective and probably use less power.
@DelosWorld:
Great call... most likely true!
@DeadWriter:
I don't think it looks like a cyclotron at all.. not coils.
I does however look like an old laboratory x-ray lamp.
- Anode on the side.
- Cathode in center and slanted. ( so x-rays shoot at 90 degrees)
- The guy would be cleaning the x-ray outlet end of the lamp.
We had one just like it in the lab under lock and key in high school. Without shielding you would get fried by x-rays.
If you shoot enough intense x-rays you could kill someone... (eventually - not instantly)
My guess why it did not take off... the smallest field deployable unit was most likely 2 ~ 3 tons in weight.
So, you point it at things, pull the trigger, and they die?! Amazing, this must be some sort of superscience, the type of which no man of the 1950s would be willing to use!
Oh, wait, it's like a gun, except it takes up half a room, requires truly massive amounts of power. It's probably, depending on frequency, also rather fragile, and might be blocked or reflected depending on frequency. I can't see this damned thing being useful in an offensive manner.
As for "turning blood to water", you can turn blood into plasma (the clear liquid that makes up more than half of your blood) with the right electromagnetic waves; that'd pop you pretty good.
@Slappy McSlapp: Hahahahaha....
They sold it on eBay with their "Beam Katana". Some guy, Travis Touchdown bought them both. Bastard outbid me at the last second.
So that's what the early design of the Microwave looked like. Retro!
I remember using these Death Rays back in nam, we were on recon plan charlie, and our unit got ambsuhed..... next thing we know, rain came down!
:: sigh ::
I thought that by now people would have known that Superman is the real lord and saviour (mainly because when he goes senile he will be able to do just that.
I also thought that yirmummah.net had settled this a long time ago... [yirmumah.net] ... Well i guess that's why it is a retro modo after all.
Faced with an imminent defeat in the second world war Japanese scientists were presented with two options. Attempt to salvage the war by building an atomic bomb, or attempt to salvage the war by building a death ray. While Japanese scientists could have built an atomic bomb (much as the Nazis actually could have before their defeat), they did not have the proper equipment, facilities or raw materials to do so before the home islands were expected to be invaded. So they turned their energies (literally) to the design and construction of 'death ray' machines, which they actually knew much LESS about than atomic bombs.
The result ? After extensive testing on 'monkeys' (which may have in fact been a euphamism for human test subjects) with microwave based 'death ray' devices, it was concluded that these devices were in fact effective at killing animal/human life...but at such a high cost in power and at such a short range as to be impractical as either an offensive or defensive weapon. It would take all the electrical energy production capabilities of Honshu powering a single device the size of a battle cruiser to be of any use, and it might actually be just as dangerous to the user as the target.
So I rather suspect that if these efforts mirrored ones taken in the states, the results are probably the same. Dangerous, unreliable, inefficient curios best (and ultimately) left on the shelf...
But hey it wasn't a total loss. Have you ever used a Japanese microwave oven ? And you thought their toilets were b@d@ss...
Cleveland 216 yo!
@unearthlyb: Ha! Those guys at Los Alamos were damn sexy, though, huh?
supposedly it "dissolved red blood corpuscles"
TIME, July 23, 1934
the Modern Mechanix article: [www.makezine.com]
or Popular Science - 1940, rather
to kill em all steve just said... "boom"