6. Tesla’s Death Ray
via.fourwinds10.net
Death rays are an unutterably cool proposition; from Darth Vadar to Stewie Griffin, all the best fictional characters have one. Of course, death rays look great on screen because no matter how awesome Vadar melting Luke Skywalker’s caravan from 6,000 miles away may look, we know they’re not real and nobody in their right mind would try and develop one in real life. Nobody, that is, bar the greatest mind of all time.
When asked what it was like to be the smartest person alive, Albert Einstein famously replied, “You’d better ask Nikola Tesla”. The serb scientist was a brilliant visionary, developing the idea of wifi technology in 1893 and x-ray imaging long before it was widely used. His reputation as an archetypical mad scientist was justified – one of his last ideas that he expressed interest in patenting was a death ray. The device used electromagnetic repulsion to create an all-penetrating beam of particles that could melt any aircraft engine from 250 miles away, rendering the country absolutely impregnable from the air.
Tesla tried in vain to sell his idea to the USA, the UK, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, all of whom politely backed out of the door while never taking their eyes from the inventor. If even the Americans and Russians think your weapon is too dangerous to handle, then you should definitely put it into a locked safe and fire the damn thing into space.
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