Three original Rife Machines have been found. Find out how they really worked by reading:
The Rife Machine Report

Chapter #1

What is a Rife ray
tube and how does it work?

Dr. Rife used a ray tube with his Rife Machines. A ray tube was made out of glass, quartz or Pyrex and was filled with a noble gas or a mixture of noble gases. Above is a photo of the only known surviving "Original Beam Ray Clinical instrument." This instrument was analysed for this report and you will notice that its ray tube is lit. Dr. Rife used different mixtures of gases but finally ended up using only helium. He stated:

RIFE: “We have experimented with various inert gases and we found that helium stood up by the bombardment better than any of the other gases. That’s why we use it. We don’t care about the color or anything of that sort. It stood up better over many more hours of bombardment than the argon and the crypton and those different gases that we tried.” (John Marsh Collection, Gonin and Siner Papers, Page 25)

The ray tube was connected to the Rife Machine by two wires. These wires were connected to two round metal bars that went into the glass tube and they had round disks connected to their ends. One disk was straight and the other one was on a 45 degree angle. This gave it a directional effect towards the patient. 

Dr. Rife stated that the ray tube was “a partial directional antenna". Because the scientific technology behind ray tubes had already been perfected, Dr. Rife worked with that technology and only had to make some adjustments for it to work the way he wanted it to in his applications. Bertrand L. Comparet, Dr. Rife’s attorney, stated in an interview:

COMPARET: “Now, the original instrument had a tube, like an X-ray tube. That was the way in which Rife developed it. You see, all the X-ray work necessarily was done with a beam projected from a tube. So, Rife worked on the same basis.” (1970’s Bertrand Comparet Interview #32)

Many people believe that ray tubes are just as efficient as metal antennas and this may be true. They also believe that the energy emitted from a ray tube will actually travel farther with less loss than a metal antenna. Since there are no actual scientific tests comparing the output of ray tubes to metal antennas it is hard to know for sure if these assumptions are correct. For this report we will accept what is known, not what is un-known. Therefore we will compare ray tubes to metal antennas since they both are designed to emit frequencies.

There are limitations to metal antennas that need to be understood and this has to do with the laws of physics. It is referred to as the "Inverse-Square Law". This law deals with power loss and distance. We will give a simple explanation which should suffice since we are trying to stay in layman's terms and make it easy for the average person to understand. When a circuit is properly tuned metal antennas are very efficient. About 100% of the energy that you put into a metal antenna comes out, but only if the impedance is matched correctly.

Dr. Rife’s #3 instrument information that has been obtained from the Rife documents list that about 50 RF watts was input into ray tube. If we compare this to a metal antenna this means about 50 watts would have passed through and come out of the ray tube. When it comes to metal antennas and the inverse-square law on signal loss this would mean that you would have to divide the 50 watts that come out of the metal antenna by four for every foot that you move away from the antenna. The exact power loss of a ray tube, as stated before, is not known but if a ray tube is equally as efficient as a metal antenna then the same laws of physics would also apply to it.

Since no actual scientific tests have been done with ray tubes demonstrating that they are exempt from the inverse-square law then we are left with only one conclusion, this law does apply to ray tubes. Because of this we will use this inverse-square law of power loss for a ray tube. Therefore, at one foot away from the ray tube you only have 12.5 watts. At two feet you only have 3.125 watts and at 3 feet you only have about .78 of a watt. The laws of physics are important to understand because Dr. Rife and the doctors that used his equipment put the ray tube within a few inches of the patient’s body.

Dr. Couche said that he would sometimes touch the body of the patient in the area that needed to be treated. When we discussed this with Dr. Robert P. Stafford M.D., he said that when he treated cancer patients he would put the ray tube within a few inches of the body and treat a 6 inch square area. He would move the ray tube up and down and back and forth so that the whole 6 inch area was treated. He said that he did this because of the way the phanotron (ray tube nickname) ray tube worked. The design of a phanotron ray tube makes it partially directional and concentrates its energy or power into a smaller area. With the power loss from the ray tube it is easy to understand why Dr. Stafford, Dr. Couche, Dr. Rife and the other doctors used the ray tube right next to the body.

We built both the Aubrey Scoon Beam Ray replica ray tube instrument and the 1950’s AZ-58 Beam Ray replica ray tube Rife Machine. The AZ-58 (a 1950’s Rife instrument made by Life Labs) was built from schematics that are on Stan Truman’s site, http://www.rife.org, under AZ-58 research information. This AZ-58 instrument is nearly the same as the original Beam Ray instrument and schematics can be found at http://www.scoon.co.uk/Electrotherapy/Rife/BeamRay/index.htm. Both Aubrey Scoon’s instrument and the original Beam Ray instrument we have use sine wave audio frequencies and the 1950s AZ-58 uses square wave audio frequencies. We tested the AZ-58 and Aubrey Scoon’s replica for penetration and found that at about 32 inches from the body full penetration of the carrier frequency emitted from the ray tube was lost. This test was done in this manner. A B&K frequency counter was used and the antenna was put in a fold of body tissue on the front of the body. The ray tube was put behind the person and move backwards until the carrier frequency could no longer be read through the person’s body. John Crane listed the AZ-58 as outputting 14 watts out of the ray tube but we tested it and found it outputs at least 30 to 40 watts. The 1940s Aubrey Scoon instrument puts out about 30 to 40 watts also.

Another test was made using a crystal for testing resonance. The audio frequencies broadcast out of the ray tube from both these machines could only resonate a crystal designed to test resonance through about two inches of tissue. From the tests made, it takes a carrier frequency of at least 0.125 watts to penetrate all the way through the body. It could take an output of 50 watts from a ray tube to resonate a crystal through 14 inches of tissue. These tests showed that it takes more power to penetrate all the way through the body when modulating an audio frequency on a carrier frequency than when a single un-modulated frequency is used. The tests were done using the AZ-58 replica and the Aubrey Scoon replica Rife machine using a phanotron ray tube outputting about 30 to 40 watts. Another interesting thing worth noting is when we turned the ray tube more than 45 degrees either to the right or the left of center we could not resonate the crystal. Another test showed we could not resonate the crystal at all on the backside of the phanotron ray tube proving what Dr. Rife said: “The ray tube is a partially directional antenna.” One interesting fact worth noting is the ray tubes that do not use the internal electrodes like the phanotron ray tube have a higher field strength reading which indicates a greater output. These ray tubes use copper collars or wire wrapping around the ray tube. Below are two more photos of Dr. Rife's ray tubes.