Teenager Builds His Own “Death Ray” Using a 2,000-Year-Old Methodology

Science fairs can be a great time to showcase your innovation and inspiration. While some of us will be treating the standard volcanoes (which is still undoubtedly cool), others, like Canadian middle schooler Brenden Sener, will be designing a death ray.

Archimedes of Syracuse was an ancient Greek mathematician, physicist, engineer, astronomer, and inventor who lived from c. 287 BC to 212 BC. He earned recognition as one of the leading scientists of classical antiquity.

Sener’s inspiration for his death ray came from a record of Archimedes creating a weapon that used mirrors to set Roman ships on fire more than 2,000 years ago. The middle schooler created a miniature version of the death ray with mirrors and heat lamps.

Sener became interested in the famous mathematician after watching a documentary that included the Archimedes screw. The ancient machine, also known as the water screw or Egyptian screw, raised water like a pump.

“Due to Archimedes being such an amazing inventor, I decided to research more of his inventions,” he said to Business Insider. During his research, Sener discovered that Archimedes created a weapon that functioned by “tilting a kind of mirror toward the sun.”

In a scaled-down version of Archimedes’s death ray, Sener used a heating lamp to represent the sun. Small, concave mirrors reflected the light onto a piece of cardboard with a targeted naked as “X.”

“It was just a smaller version of as close as I could get it in real life,” Sener said. The result of his science fair project drew Sener to the conclusion that Archimedes’s death ray wasn’t impossible if it had used many more mirrors and a hotter heat source, like the actual sun.

The Death Ray has its pop culture allure surrounding it. It is the thing made of legend, mystery, and power. Who wouldn’t want to get their hands on one?

A century after Descartes’s findings, Athanasius Kircher went to Syracuse to figure out how far the Roman boats would need to be for the mirrors to work on setting alight. In 1747, Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, a French naturalist, attempted to replicate the mirror-based death ray.

The popular TV show “Mythbusters” attempted to recreate Archimedes’s death ray three times. However, each attempt failed, debunking the “myth” behind Archimedes’s legendary death ray.

So why was Sener successful (on a miniature scale) when so many others were getting inconsistent findings? Sener pointed out that moving boats are difficult targets. Cloud coverage, distance from shore, and wetness of the wood could all affect the death ray’s ability to start a fire.

Mirrors have an amazing power to dazzle everyone and everything, big or small. But the plausibility of using several mirrors tilted and adjusting toward the sun and a target sounds more likely to be a myth than fact.