Sale
16871 - Mechanical Music & Scientific Instruments, 10 Nov 2009
Knightsbridge
Lot No: 113*
Scientific Instruments An exceptionally rare Royal R Rife polished steel compound microscope, American, dated 1932,
engraved on the tube "ROYAL R. RIFE 1932", with massive vertical column supporting the compound barrel (lacking ocular and objective) with three fine screw adjustments for vertical, transverse and circular motion, circular stage with rotating and mechanical movement in both axis with engraved scales and verniers, sub-stage Abbe condenser with rack and pinion focusing, a slanted quartz prism and electric illuminant with bulls eye lens engraved THE RIFE MICROSCOPE LAMP, the whole mounted on heavy platform base with three leveling feet and a quantity of accessories 19in (48cm) high; 15in (38cm) wide
Sold for £14,400 inclusive of Buyer's Premium
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Email: Laurence Fisher
Tel: 0044 (0)8700 273 633
Footnote:
Provenance
The microscope was recently purchased in the USA from an elderly gentleman who had visited the Rife laboratory in San Diago with his father when he was a young boy. His father was a friend of Rife's and as a watchmaker he might have had some involvement with the construction of the metalwork on the microscopes. This microscope, along with some other instruments, were gifted by Rife to the watchmaker and upon his death, they passed to his son and hence to the current owner.
The Rife Microscope
Only five instruments were made by Rife. The only known other remaining example is No. 5 which is housed in the Science Museum, London and it is engraved on the barrel "designed and built by Royal R Rife 1938". Rife's masterpiece was No. 3, known as the Universal, it was immensely complicated, built in 1933 and photographs exist showing it set up for use with a Leica camera. According to Professor Hubbard, who was Professor of Pathology at the State University of New York and had been interested in Rife and his microscopes since 1937, No. 1 was a horizontally microscope and No. 2 an upright version. As the microscope offered here is upright and it was made in 1932, there is a possibility that it is the Rife No.2.
For more information on the No. 5 and Professor Hubbard's comments see The Science Museum's Synopsis on Rife http://users.navi.net/~rsc/scisyn.htm
Royal R Rife
Royal Raymond Rife was born in America in 1888 of Scottish ancestry. Whilst at John Hopkins University, he began working for the American arm of the German lens manufacturer Carl Zeiss and later spent some time with them in Germany. At the outbreak of WW1 he returned to America and is believed to have worked for the US Government. In the 1920's he began designing and building microscopes and by 1933 had perfected the technology for his incredibly complex Universal Microscope, the third of five, which claimed to be able to magnify objects to 60,000 times their normal size, enabling the viewer to see live viruses for the first time.
As a result of his observations, Rife claimed that he could identify a "Mortal Oscillatory Rate" for various pathogenic organisms and could destroy specific organisms by the directed radio frequency energy of a patented "Beam Ray" machine, although these results were never independently verified. Consequently, Rife had become commercially involved with the Beam Ray Company, which manufactured equipment purportedly to cure cancer based on Rife's theories. Although clinical trials were started, the treatment aroused the hostility of the medical establishment and a damaging lawsuit effectively bankrupted the company in the late 1930's.
In the following years approximately 100 of Rife's Frequency Instruments were in use by Physicians around the world and by the 1950's interest had been revived, but again medical hostility resulted in attacks on Rife's laboratory and prosecution of his associates. Rife retired to obscurity and died of a heart attack in 1971, and although there have been several attempts in recent years to market devices based on Rife's technology the field remains mired in controversy and litigation.
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