As my family were neighbours to HGM, north of Craig-Cefn-Parc, my mother has recollections of him jawing with her grandfather around the kitchen table. Foster interviewed my great aunt as part of his research and she and I went to a talk given by him, to promote the launch of his book on Grindell Mathews, last Friday (3rd April 2009).

During an entertaining hour, he relayed one story of how people driving their cars past his house, on their way to/from Ammanford, reported experiences of their cars cutting out, for no apparent reason.
(Is was known that a wing of his isolated property was used as a laboratory).

When talking to my mother later, I repeated several of the ‘dits’ from Foster’s talk, but whe I mentioned the above, she said she could remember her grandfather coming home from Tor Clawdd (Mathews’ house) and excitedly telling her of what he had just witnessed – the cars being stopped! I would guess that this happened @ 200-300 yards, from aerial photographs of the house.

What was not conveyed during the talk was the suspicion the local community generally had about him during the thirties and forties and that he was by enlarge ostracised, primarily because of portrayals of him as a the architypal ‘mad scientist’ with scary machines (Think of Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future crossed with Flash Gordon) .

True, same end result, but very different effect and mechanism.

I’m wary of the term ‘genius’ and while their technical achievement which netted Dec 17 1903, they weren’t alone – other also were getting there in terms of inventing the aeroplane. If they hadn’t existed, it wouldn’t have halted progress – and their direct influence in the era is almost always over-estimated as most disregard their secrecy and litigation. (Not that detracts from what they did achieve, to be fair.)

Apparently not, it seems not to have cropped up very often. J. B. S. Haldane said something similar in a critique, but not many others did that I’ve come across. Of course, half the so-called inventors had probably never heard of the inverse-square law …

Erik:

Yes, it’s not that silly, in that context. But the inventors were usually talking about more than a subtle induction of sparks at a distance. There was the ability to kill animals (not by simply zapping them), for example. On the one hand, Grindell Matthews’ original experiment is described by Barwell as producing a sort of electrical ray, but then in a riposte to Lord Birkenhead he explicitly states that it’s an electromagnetic, between x-rays and UV, and would have a maximum range of 5-8 miles. Other rays seem to be microwave or radio frequency and so on. There’s no consistency. And besides, most of these people published in the popular press, not in the scientific literature — there’s no need for them to be particularly scientifically plausible. So while you can pick some threads out and say there was some plausibility there in contemporary engineering terms (and T. F. Wall would be interesting to explore for that), I don’t think that explains the popularity of the idea.

JDK:

And there’s a direct connection between the death ray and RDF, too: Harry Wimperis was one of the Air Ministry’s observers of Grindell Matthew’s setup in 1924, and it was he who asked Watson-Watt in 1935 to see if there really was anything to the possibility of a death ray …

As for Napiers, Eric, have you ever read LK Setwright’s _The Power To Fly_? His homage to the Nomad is a fine bit of prose.

Like the stun gun and galactic credits, death rays are a kind of ‘meta-invention’ – everyone knows what they are, they just don’t exist! Fertile fields for charlatans, but also a way for getting funding for a more odd sounding invention that did work – RDF.

As to the Wrights, all fair comment. I think their combination of scientific-based endeavour and awareness of their own achievement was compromised by their moral and religious based arrogance, meaning that they were a pain to deal with and expected people to pay big money and take their word for their offer, up front. It wasn’t long before they’d under-estimated progress and were over-estimating what they had to offer – quite the case study, IMHO. Meanwhile, as Brett’s said, others just got on with it and left them behind. Their litigiousness directly crippled US aviation for about a decade – as much against them as their first flight achievement was for them.