Harry Grindell Matthews crouched inside a small cupboard and placed one hand on the lever of his new invention. The air crackled with electricity. On the other side of his laboratory, three representatives of the Air Ministry, Matthews’ two assistants and his business manager waited for the signal.
Thick linoleum covered the chequerboard floor at 2 Harewood Place, London. From the outside, the tall red-brick building with a view of Oxford Street looked more like a block of mansion flats than a scientific workshop. It was May 26 1924, a Monday morning.
The men stared at the contraption. It had the appearance of a metal spotlight, 4ft across with a ceramic base and three smaller cones mounted around its rim. It was pointed at a single-cylinder motorcycle engine on the far side of the laboratory. Harnessing the power of light and the new technology of radio waves, Matthews said, his beam would stop the engine dead.
That wasn’t all, he promised. It could ignite gunpowder, burn a hole through a pane of glass, kill a mouse at 64ft. Most excitingly for the Air Ministry brass, Matthews claimed his beam could stop combustion engines and bring down aircraft when fired from the ground perhaps from four or five miles away in time. And, as much as Matthews wanted to keep his invention for Britain and its Empire, time was of the essence. The French government, he told the Air Ministry, was very interested.
He always called his invention a beam. In the press, it had another name. Popular radio called it “the new death-dealing diabolic ray”. The work to get to this point had, in Matthews’ account, been dangerous. The press carried lurid, scarcely credible stories of people having skin stripped from their faces by the death ray’s sheer power. Matthews said it had been tested to 50KW, and he kept his equipment in porcelain tubs filled with oil to contain the electricity. Even so, he said the door handles of the laboratory had become electrified. Now, at Harewood Place, it was aimed at the motorcycle engine, which was running on a table.
Major Harry Wimperis of the Air Ministry signalled to Matthews. The beam burst into life. A bluish-red light shot out of it and hit the motorcycle engine. The engine sputtered, struggled and stopped. The death ray, it seemed, had worked.
People who knew Matthews towards the end of his life remembered a tall, elegant gentleman. He wore a black suit, a silk shirt with a tie or a cravat, an eye patch and a black velvet Stetson. His high forehead, broad shoulders and bright blue eyes gave him the look of a matinee idol. He was a chain-smoker and relentless tea drinker. Children liked him, though he had none himself. He seemed mysterious, jolly and kind.
Matthews was born in 1880 in a village in rural Gloucestershire where his family-owned farmland and orchards. They were comfortably off until Matthews’ father died suddenly when he, the youngest of six children, was just three years old. He found a father figure in the village blacksmith, Jacob Savery. Savery’s broad arms and practical mind made him “the perfect man” to the young Matthews. And Savery taught Matthews the rudiments of engineering.
By the time he was in his teens, Matthews had started doing his own experiments. He convinced his older brother, Arthur, to try out some wooden wings he’d made to help them both fly, and the pair leapt out of a second-floor window. Luckily, they didn’t hurt themselves too badly.
At 19, Matthews joined up with the South African Constabulary and fought in the Boer War, before being invalided home with dysentery. In 1911, at the age of 31, he became a consulting engineer for Gilbert Sackville, 8th Earl De La Warr. It was then that Matthews came up with his first important invention, the Aerophone, which was a wireless radio system that allowed pilots to communicate with people on the ground.
Often, when reading about Matthews’ life, one has the strange sensation that it all happens too fast, that it’s too strange to be true. He demonstrated the Aerophone to Queen Mary at Buckingham Palace in 1912. He invented an early form of talking pictures, and used it to record a farewell message from Ernest Shackleton before an Arctic expedition in 1921. He met Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels in Berlin in 1937. He married the horticulturalist and famously terrible opera singer Ganna Walska in 1938. He claimed his cat Twinkie could communicate with him telepathically.
His ideas often sound like they’ve been plucked from Fritz Lang movies and HG Wells novels. The Luminaphone, a musical instrument that created tones by shining light through holes in a perforated metal disc. A submarine that could be controlled by flashlights from the shore. Aerial mines hanging from parachutes to take out enemy aircraft over London.
A century on from the experiment that both made his name and, as it turned out, alienated him from the people he most wanted to impress, Matthews is an obscure figure. But in his lifetime he was celebrated for his inventions and his showmanship. His outsized public persona and wild promises to show humanity a glimpse of its future were at odds with how people remembered him. Some knew a kindly gentleman, quick to amuse. Others saw a shallow, deceptive, delusional crank.
His friend and biographer Ernest Barwell, a pious, serious man from south Wales, compared Matthews to Nikola Tesla, the restless genius whose inventions in the late 19th century paved the way for an electrified, wireless future. Barwell had become friendly with Matthews while working at his day job as a journalist on Fleet Street in the 1910s and found the inventor a reliable source of colourful stories and quotes. In the press Matthews painted himself as the archetypal lonely, obsessive genius.
“My companion is an old crippled cat called Twinkie who feebly drags along beside me,” he told New York’s Evening Journal in July 1924. He would work from 10am to 3am the following morning, he said. “I have no family.”
After the Aerophone, Matthews was sufficiently well known to appear in newspaper adverts for a health tonic called Phosferine, which he claimed cured him of several nervous breakdowns (“The tonic is a first rate antidote to dejection!”). But it was the death ray that made him a star.
Celebrity didn’t always sit easily with him, however, and he felt misunderstood by the public and burnt by the publicity that followed him. “Why do the press call me the Death Ray Man?” he asked Barwell. “Am I a monster of destruction, seeking only to turn what brains have been given me for the annihilation of others? Can’t they realise what this machine may be able to do?”
In the winter of 1931, bankrupt and blacklisted by the British state following a subsequent disastrous attempt to show them that his invention worked, he hid himself away. He holed up in a place called Tor Clawdd, near the town of Craig-cefn-parc, south Wales. The bungalow laboratory he built is still there, its white walls and black beams gloomy against the fields.
Tor Clawdd is a long drive out of Swansea, up through the hills and on to the moorland. It’s a lonely spot. There are no trees or other houses, and nothing to buffer the wind blowing in from the coast. The wind and the trickling water, running down through the grasses and into becks towards the road, are the only sounds.
Even the sheep on the nearby farms don’t bother coming up this far. A rough track winds around the side of a rise right at the top of the moor. To the west, you can see across to the Gower peninsula and the Bristol Channel, but the bungalow is hidden by the shoulder of the peak, turned away from the rolling landscape.
Nobody knows for certain why Matthews moved to Tor Clawdd. One story says he was flying his plane over the hills, spotted a flattish area he could land on, and chose the spot to build himself a laboratory there. It was built from scratch to his design. When he moved in, there was a long laboratory room, a chintzy sitting room, a bedroom and kitchen. On the sitting room mantelpiece was the motto “Regardez les cieux” (watch the skies).
The nearest town, Craig-cefn-parc, was built around the drift mine that employed most of the men in the area at the point when Matthews moved here; professional types had moved away. Unlike Matthews, most people spoke Welsh. It feels like the home of someone who didn’t want to be found.
Still, letters collected by a TV production company for a documentary about Matthews in the mid-1980s paint a picture of a popular local eccentric. When Audrey Watts, whose uncle was a friend of Matthews, was a child, the inventor would put her on his shoulders as he and her uncle walked to the pub. When she and her friends spotted Matthews’ big, black chauffeur-driven car in the tight, wooded lanes around the village, they followed it. Matthews was known to give out sweets.
Children in the village heard that he was building a machine to control the weather, or a moon rocket, or a device to stop earthquakes. One legend held that he had met Winston Churchill in the Mason’s Arms pub at the bottom of the hill to discuss his secret inventions.
You have probably never heard of Matthews or his death ray. If Britain had built a working laser capable of shooting down planes in the 1930s, you would have heard. The truth is that neither the man nor his inventions were quite what they seemed.
Several academics to whom I showed Matthews’ plans for his death ray came to the same conclusion: it was bunk. “He appears to describe a bright lamp, which, on its own, could not do the things [he] attributed to it,” Patrick Parkinson of the University of Manchester’s Photon Science Institute told me. It was, he said, “speculative bordering on the fraudulent”.
Richard Perks, a senior lecturer at Cardiff University’s Centre for High Frequency Engineering, attempted to build Matthews’ death ray himself for a BBC programme in 2011. “Basically, I think the guy was inadvertently generating microwave power,” he says. “Mess with any high-voltage system and switch it off and on fast, you’re gonna pump out broad spectrum transient microwave pulses.” That might light the lamp, he said, but little else.
When Perks worked at BAE Systems, he said, there were “a lot of clever people with big budgets and [they] were able to develop nothing like the claims Matthews made”. Right now, something like the death ray is still at the very edge of military capability. In July this year, the UK defence minister John Healey announced that the ministry had just test-fired a laser weapon which could, just as Matthews’ death ray promised, destroy enemy targets from more than a kilometre away and zap drones out of the sky.
For 25 years Matthews worked in an area between the plausibly scientific and the romantic but impossible, rustling up money from investors then watching his companies collapse when he ran out of cash. He had developed a reputation. During the first world war, the British government invited him to show off his submarine detector, but just before the demonstration began he flew into a rage at Admiralty inspectors, whom he accused of sabotaging his demonstration. This would become something of a theme: Matthews would organise theatrical demonstrations, in the hope of enticing investors, then become frustrated and defensive when put under scrutiny.
Still, his investors believed in him and he often found influential figures to advocate for him. In the first world war, the naval admiral Lord Fisher persuaded the British government to give Matthews £25,000 — somewhere in the region of £2.3mn today — for his submarine detector which, when trialled, didn’t work. (Had he convinced the government it was worth pursuing, Matthews hoped he’d be in line for a total of £250,000, or £23.8mn today.)
Matthews was charismatic and plausible and, if he said even a fraction of the things Barwell attributes to him, clearly had an extraordinary sense of his own destiny. It’s impossible to say whether he was knowingly conning people, but by early 1924 that is what the scientific establishment had started to suspect.
A handwritten Air Ministry memo in the National Archives reports that the secretary of state — likely Sir Samuel Hoare, the then Air Minister — met Sir Ernest Rutherford in Cambridge shortly before the death ray test that May. Rutherford, who had won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry and went on to do groundbreaking work in nuclear and atomic chemistry, had heard all about Matthews and his £25,000. The minister’s assistant wrote that Rutherford was “very outspoken” on the subject.
“He has no doubt whatsoever that the ‘ray’ could prove to all intents and purposes useless,” the memo ran. Rutherford had already told The Times newspaper that Matthews was a quack, and he bluntly told the government to drop him, and to drop him now.
At 4.15pm on May 26 1924, the three men who had seen Matthews’ demonstration presented their findings to the Air Ministry. Major Harry Wimperis went first. He was a distinguished engineer and inventor in his late forties, with a stern, lean face and greying hair. He had not liked Matthews’ demonstration one bit. The first part of the test, where the ray appeared to light a lamp from across the room, was “entirely unconvincing”, Wimperis said. He had felt insulted by it. “There was a certain simplicity of character revealed by this demonstration and I was rather surprised to find the inventor should imagine that one would be impressed,” he went on.
Wimperis demanded to move the engine off its bench to check whether there were any leads running into it through the table. Matthews became fidgety, Wimperis said, “and explained further that he was in a great hurry” before mentioning again that the French were “all over” the death ray.
Another Admiralty scientist, Edward Andrade, was more blunt. The lamp trick, he said, was “easily repeated in any laboratory”, little more than a piece of old-hat showmanship. “There was every opportunity for concealed wires, or coils underneath the bench,” he added. The whole thing had been, in his opinion, “worthless”.
Still, the men wondered if there was something they were missing. The next day Wimperis went back to Harewood Place to make Matthews an offer to try the death ray out again, only to find that he had recently left for Croydon Airport. Wimperis dashed to Croydon, along with a group of Matthews’ investors who’d just managed to get an injunction to stop him from selling his invention to the French, and got there just in time to see Matthews’ plane to Paris taking off.
In the autumn of 1924, Matthews travelled to New York. His hotel was swamped with journalists waiting to see the death ray man. After leaving London, he had made a very theatrical documentary with Warner Brothers demonstrating the death ray, complete with dramatic puffs of smoke from the objects in its line of fire. It had been a sensation. Matthews’ time had come. “England has definitely lost the chance of obtaining my invention,” he told reporters.
This was to be his zenith. Keen to sell his idea in Europe, Matthews teamed up with foundry owner Eugene Royer on October 20 1924 to file a patent for the death ray in France under Royer’s name. Charles Dick from the British consulate in Paris tried to warn Matthews that Royer was “a most unreliable person, in a financial position bordering on bankruptcy”, but Matthews went ahead anyway. Dick sent word back to England that given the company he was keeping, Matthews was to be avoided.
Interest in the death ray fizzled out. Matthews was offered a chance to demonstrate it at Madison Square Garden in the summer of 1925, but declined. That year, he married his second wife, an American divorcee named Olive Waite (he had previously been married to a barmaid from Bristol, but the marriage didn’t last long). Aside from earning $3,000 as a consultant for Warner Brothers (the death ray apparatus was used as a prop in its films) he lived off Waite’s money for the next five years. When she divorced him in 1930, he decided to return home.
His next big idea was the sky projector that used a powerful spotlight to project messages on to clouds. He demonstrated it on Hampstead Heath on Christmas Eve 1930, but couldn’t find a commercial use for it. It was his most expensive failure yet. On May 27 1931, he was declared bankrupt.
It’s hard to find the real Matthews. But the notes from his bankruptcy hearing in January 1932 come close. His short answers sound crumpled, defeated. Bruce Park, the official receiver, asked whether there was any interest in his talking films. “No,” Matthews told him. “Not now.” He retreated to Tor Clawdd and tinkered away at the top of the hill.
He was not entirely forgotten though. In an unpublished memoir of his own, Barwell, Matthews’ friend and biographer, remembered being summoned to London in 1937 (Matthews still kept an office there). There was news: the Nazi government had invited him to Berlin to meet Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, and Matthews wanted Barwell with him.
Barwell and Matthews flew to Berlin the same afternoon and were driven to the propaganda ministry. There, Goebbels spread out newspaper clippings from Britain and America singing the praises of Matthews’ sky-projector. Goebbels wanted to use it to beam Hitler’s face into the sky at rallies.
“As much as I hated the club-footed dwarf on sight, I had to admire his ability to grasp anything of propaganda value,” Barwell wrote of Goebbels. In Barwell’s telling, Matthews fed them a line about the invention not being ready yet and they got out of Berlin as quickly as possible. Matthews regarded the whole trip with a wry, detached cool, according to Barwell, who seemed deeply disturbed by it.
Whether that was the case is debatable. Barwell’s biography of Matthews is a hagiography so credulous about his achievements and character that it’s hard to take it seriously. But accepting an invitation from the Nazis in the first place does suggest Matthews was either intensely naive, extremely cynical, or some combination of the two.
In 1938, Matthews married his third wife, Ganna Walska. Having inherited each of her four previous husbands’ money, she was extremely wealthy. She had spent much of the 1920s trying to establish herself as an opera singer in America despite having, by all accounts, an awful voice. One performance of Giordano’s Fedora in Havana ended with her being pelted with rotten vegetables. Orson Welles based Charles Foster Kane’s tone-deaf wife in Citizen Kane, Susan Alexander, on Walska. She and Matthews divorced in 1941 and, once again, he moved back to south Wales.
Walska’s 1943 memoir is full of self-aggrandisement bordering on fantasy, but she clearly felt little for her former husband. “Everything about him was negative,” she wrote. She paints Matthews as a jealous, clingy, fame-hungry self-publicist whose bitterness was eating him up inside. “His only happy moments were when reading about himself in the newspapers,” Walska wrote, “although he knew the articles only appeared because he himself gave out the material for them. It gave him real pleasure to read how important he was and how unappreciative the government was of his genius.”
Back at Tor Clawdd, Matthews seemed to be unravelling. Late one summer evening in 1941, smoke swirled across the moorland as he threw his diaries, patents and notebooks on to a bonfire. Nobody knows why he did this. It is tempting to see him as a guilty man, knowing his time was short, trying to cover his tracks.
But some of his inventions, like the Aerophone and the talking pictures, really had worked. It’s not hard to see his disappointment at not being taken seriously, at having failed to create the future he’d imagined. Perhaps he felt, while throwing drawings, notes and scraps of ideas into the flames, that his life’s work just wasn’t worth preserving.
On the morning of September 11 1941, Matthews’ housekeeper found him slumped over his writing desk, dead. He had finally succumbed to atheroma and a heart attack while writing a letter to an American company that had offered him a job and a route back to a country he felt matched his ambitions. (Even his death was sensationalised. Barwell writes that Matthews had not one but four heart attacks that morning.) Only seven people attended his funeral. His brother Albert scattered his ashes over the hill at Tor Clawdd.
Today, Harry Grindell Matthews is not completely forgotten in south Wales. In Clydach’s Coed Gwilym Park, next to the Swansea canal, there are three metal silhouettes. One is of the midwife Lilian Smith, who helped deliver three generations of babies in the area. A second is of the rugby referee Derek Bevan, who was born in Clydach. The third is of Matthews, one hand at the control panel of some invention. He’s frozen as he was, looking hopefully to the future. You can see straight through him.
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