Annie Jacobsen: The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency. Hachette Group, New York & London 2015, ISBN 978-0316371667: “In a 2014 interview for this book, Charles Townes, then age ninety-eight, confirmed that he had been inspired to create the laser after reading Alexei Tolstoi’s 1926 science-fiction novel The Garin Death Ray.” (S. 261) “The second profound thing Charles Townes said to me, and I mentioned it earlier in this book, was that he was personally inspired to invent the laser after reading the science-fiction novel The Garin Death Ray, written by Alexei Tolstoi…” (S. 440).
The "Death Ray" rivals in der New York Times vom 29. Mai 1924: „The inventors of a "death ray" multiply every day. To H. GRINDELL MATTHEWS and Professor T.F. WALL have been added two other Englishmen, PRIOR and RAFFE, and GRAMMACHIKOFF, a Russian. Herr WULLE, "chief of the militarists" in the Reichstag, has informed that body that the Government has a device that will bring down airplanes, stop tank engines, and "spread a curtain of death."“
