Tesla "Death Ray" not really a ray?

Hello all,
I recently finished a biogrpahy of Nikola Tesla by Mary Cheney
(Tesla: Man Out of Time). It's chronological and has some references
to his inventions and hypotheses but in minute detail.
The description of the "Death Ray" got me thinking. There is a quote
about stopping 10,000 enemy planes from entering within hundreds of
miles of a city's borders.
Since his research was heavily into fields, maybe it wasn't a death
ray afterall but instead a force field? Whether it repelled or had so
much energy it disintegrated things on contact who knows, but such a
device could fall under the same description. It would be like a field
shell instead of a filled field sphere.
Thoughts on this line of thinking? In short: Taking an electric
field and allowing it to be repulsive or filled at it's outermost edges
with highly-charged particles and/or an atoms thickness?

 

[Joe McElvenney]

Hi,

I recently finished a biogrpahy of Nikola Tesla by Mary Cheney
(Tesla: Man Out of Time). It's chronological and has some references
to his inventions and hypotheses but in minute detail.
The description of the "Death Ray" got me thinking. There is a quote
about stopping 10,000 enemy planes from entering within hundreds of
miles of a city's borders.

It was just such a thought in the 1930's, when the powers-that-be
realised the UK's vulnerability to the heavy bomber, that made them
request of the scientific community a means to achieve this. A few back
of the envelope calculations however, showed that this was impractical
but it did act to accelerate the development of early warning radar.

The inability to generate very high radiative powers, the formula for
the surface area of a sphere and latterly, the radar equation showed why.


Cheers - Joe