Radio News Magazine Jun. 1928

The cover of June, 1928 Radio News magazine illustrates an article entitled The Radio Gun—The Silent Weapon of the Future, with the further subtitle, How Concentrated Radio Impulses Might be Made to Act as "Death Rays." Here is a little more from the article:

About six years ago the world was startled to read of the invention, by an Englishman, of a so-called "death ray," to which the press attributed lethal powers far wider and more terrible than those possessed by any known weapon of destruction. The news of the advent of this allegedly-deadly ray caused a great deal of excitement, in the American daily newspapers, at least; but this quickly petered out when inquiring reporters learned that no demonstrations of the ray's effectiveness could be given and that the inventor himself was about the only person who had ever been convinced of its effectiveness at all.

The article goes on to discuss research into "ultra-short radio waves" (microwaves, in today's terminology) and other experiments that had cooked apples and killed rats in the laboratory. In contrast to the article's rather balanced text, the captions for the accompanying illustrations portray a vivid, gee-whiz future:

The radio gun lays down a silent, invisible barrier which nothing living may cross.

The airplane's speed may baffle the cannoneer; but radio is swift as light in its pursuit.

The radio gun sweeps the sky, which has no lurking-places like the earth and sea.

Other articles in this issue include:

• Warm-Weather Radio, by Hugo Gernsback
• Airplane Radio—Necessity or Luxury?
• Reception Acoustics—What It Means to the Listener
• How Many Stations on One Wavelength?
• Shoppers Must Beware of the Radio "Gyp"
• The Port of Missing Airplanes (fiction)
• The "Electric Brain" and Its Language (about encoding audio)
• England Goes in for Television
• An Audio Amplifier for the "Extension" Receiver (construction)
• How to Make The Neutroheterodyne (construction)
• The How and Why of Radio Filters
• Radio Patents
• Applying Ohm's Law to Radio Apparatus