Aviation Week: The Greek mathematician and scientist Archimedes is credited with inventing the first directed-energy (DE) weapon during the siege of Syracuse in 214-212 B.C. Writing four centuries later, the Roman author Lucian recorded Archimedes’s use of mirrors to focus sunlight on to invaders’ ships and set them on fire, although modern experimenters have failed to reproduce the weapon. H.G. Wells reintroduced the idea to the popular imagination in 1897 in The War of the Worlds, where the Martian invaders’ heat ray can destroy an armored warship. Even today, the chances of doing that are a million to one.
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