Disintegrator ray

In science fiction, a disintegrator ray is an energy beam that destroys an object by disintegrating it to its basic components, which usually disperse into the atmosphere. Ray gun is the generic term for the weapons that fire disintegrator beams.

The disintegrator gun’s first literary appearance was in Edison's Conquest of Mars (1898), the sequel novel to Fighters from Mars an unauthorized contemporary interpretation of The War of the Worlds (1898), by H.G. Wells:

In the sequel, this was Earth’s counter-weapon against the Martian “Heat-Ray” from the The War of the Worlds novel.