Royal Raymond Rife (May 16, 1888 – August 5, 1971) was an American inventor and early exponent of high-magnification time-lapse cine-micrography. Rife is known for his microscopes, which he claimed could observe live microorganisms with a magnification considered impossible for his time, and for an "oscillating beam ray" invention, which he thought could treat various ailments by "devitalizing disease organisms" using radio waves. Although he came to collaborate with scientists, doctors and inventors of the epoch, and his findings were published in newspapers and scientific journals like the Smithsonian Institution annual report of 1944, they were later rejected by the American Medical Association (AMA), the American Cancer Society (ACS) and mainstream science. Rife's supporters continue to claim that impulses of electromagnetic frequencies can disable cancerous cells and other microorganisms responsible for diseases. Most of these claims have no scientific research to back them up, and Rife machines are not approved for treatment by any health regulator. Multiple promoters have been convicted of health fraud and sent to prison.
Life and work
Little reliable published information exists describing Rife's life and work. In the 1930s, he made several optical compound microscopes and, using a movie camera, took time-lapse microscopy movies of microbes. He also built microscopes that included polarizers. Rife claimed magnifications of 17,000× or more for some of these microscopes. A report published by the Smithsonian Institution described one of these microscopes as equipped for "transmitted and monochromatic beam dark-field, polarized, and slit-ultra illumination, including also a special device for crystallography". It added that several doctors had attended a demonstration of another of Rife's microscopes and had been impressed by its clarity and high magnification. A distinctive feature of the microscopes, according to Rife and to other scientists who examined them, was a false-colour effect by which, when a microbe was illuminated by a particular wavelength of polarised monochromatic light, different for each type of microbe, the microbe and only the microbe would emit a distinctive colour of light (turquoise for typhoid bacteria, ruby red for Mycobacterium leprae, etc.), thus taking the place of staining and allowing otherwise difficult organisms to be plainly seen. Some of the observations Rife claimed to have made with his microscopes are, however, contradicted by modern findings. For instance, he reported that under certain conditions typhoid bacteria changed into a much smaller form, and claimed that most cancerous tumours contained a microbe that had no less than five forms, one of which was indistinguishable from E. coli while another resembled a fungus. Rife also reported that a 'beam ray' device of his invention could destroy microbial pathogens. Rife claimed to have documented a "Mortal Oscillatory Rate" for various pathogenic organisms, and to be able to destroy the organisms by vibrating them using radio waves of this particular frequency. According to the San Diego Evening Tribune in 1938, Rife stopped short of claiming that he could cure cancer, but did argue that he could "devitalize disease organisms" in living tissue, "with certain exceptions". In a 1931 profile, Rife warned against "medical fakers" who claim to cure disease using "electrical 'vibrations'", stating that his work did not uphold such claims.
An obituary in the Daily Californian described his death at the age of 83 on August 5, 1971, stating that he died penniless and embittered by the failure of his devices to garner scientific acceptance. Rife blamed the scientific rejection of his claims on a conspiracy involving the American Medical Association (AMA), the Department of Public Health, and other elements of "organized medicine", which had "brainwashed and intimidated" his colleagues.
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