In 1903, French physicist Prosper-René Blondlot announced something extraordinary: a brand-new form of radiation he called “N-rays” after his home base at Nancy University. According to Blondlot, these mystery rays could make a barely visible spark a little bit brighter.

Soon, French labs were identifying N-rays everywhere. Possible sources of N-rays included:

• A specialized gas burner called a WeIsbach mantle
• An incandescent lamp called a Nernst glower
• Heated silver and sheet iron
• The sun
• Living and dead bodies
• Nerves
• Muscles
• Isolated enzymes

This list of sources remains so broad and varied one starts to wonder what couldn’t produce N-rays. The only limitation seemed to be imagination. By 1906, nearly 300 articles had been published on the topic. There was one small issue standing between Blondlot and immortality in Halliday and Resnick’s Fundamentals of Physics: N-rays don’t actually exist.

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