“DEATH RAY”

Evening Star, Issue 21714, 8 May 1934, Page 10

“DEATH RAY”

FOR FLIES AND MICE NOVEL DISCOVERY An electric ray which is stated to have killed fleas and mice by, it is believed, shattering their nervous impulses, has been discovered by Mr C. B. Chadfield, a lecturer on electrical subjects at the Leicester College of Technology. Mr Chadfield, taking the view that the “ death ray ” was a scientific possibility, worked on the fines that the nervous impulses of all living creatures are of electrical origin and can be killed by a ray of high frequency. He believes that as a wineglass will shatter to a certain note from a tuning fork, so can nervous impulses be shattered by a “ death ray.” Every living thing, in his opinion, has a different wave length which can be discovered by tuning experiments. A POWERFUL APPARATUS. Mr Chadfield, working with an apparatus which restricted his range to • short distances, set up high-frequency electrical oscillations of 300,000,000 cycles between two copper plates 24in apart, and experimented with flies. Every fly passing between the plates in the path of the ray died immediately. A later experiment killed a mouse which was inside a glass beaker. The flies and the mouse bore no external marks. Mr Chadfield is to continue his experiments, and has obtained permission from the Post Office authorities to install a fivekilowatt apparatus. This will be 500 times more powerful than the apparatus which killed the flies and the mouse. A condition imposed by the Post Office authorities is that his experiments with the five-kilo-watt apparatus must be carried out in a copper-sheeted room. This Leicester death ray inventor is seeking to produce a wave length of a few centimetres with a frequency approaching infra-red. “ It is too early,” Mr Chadfield stated to a reporter, “ to discuss the killing of human beings by means of a more - powerful ray. I have been, approached by a preservemaking -firm with a view to commercialising my discovery and perfecting a ray to kill wasps, but X have not experimented on wasps yet.”