DESTRUCTIVE RAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 January 1939, Page 6

DESTRUCTIVE RAY

BRITISH INVENTOR’S CLAIMS.

SETTING PLANES ON FIRE & CAUSING RAIN.

Behind barbed wire fences on a secluded estate at White Waltham (Berks.) Government experts will shortly see a demonstration of a death ray, says a correspondent of the “Sunday Referee.” The inventor, seventy-years-old selftaught scientist, Mr Arthur Coxhead, who has worked for more than eight years perfecting his apparatus in part of a disused mansion on the estate, believes that his ray will end war for all time.

In addition to its destructive potentialities, the ray he claims, can produce rain at will hundreds of miles away.

Mr Coxhead claims that by using the ray over a part of Berkshire recently he was able to cause a violent storm over Dover.

Mr Coxhead’s apparatus concentrates the sun’s heat, directing on the target a thermal ray of intense power. It is claimed that it would make the iron bulwark of a battleship so hot that nobody could survive on board. Its terrific heat would boil the sea around it, and any ammunition aboard would explode. If an aeroplane flew into its range it would burn up like a fly in a candle flame.

“I do not intend it to be used to destroy the human race,” Mr Coxhead told me. “I believe there need be no more war.

“I can make rain whenever I please with the ray, and in that way I could prevent war. By operating my apparatus in this field I could set up a terrific storm, which would inundate a whole country overseas.”