Rife frequencies: the history and the evidence

Rife frequencies are numbers said to match, and destroy, particular microbes. They come from Royal Raymond Rife, an American inventor who in the 1920s and 1930s built microscopes and a radio-frequency machine. There is no reliable evidence that they work, and reviews call his frequencies and machines unproven and highly implausible. Harmonance plays no Rife frequencies: the tone here is 174 Hz, a Solfeggio tone.

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Thirteen brown-red ribbons of light rising in one slow arch across dark space, opening apart where the arch is highest — Thirteen ribbons in the brown-red of 174 Hz, the tone this page plays. Harmonance plays no Rife frequencies.

What are Rife frequencies?

Rife frequencies are numbers said to match a particular microbe or illness, so that a device tuned to the number can destroy its target. They are named after Royal Raymond Rife, an American inventor in San Diego who, in the 1920s and 1930s, built elaborate microscopes and a frequency machine of his own. The machine is still sold as a Rife frequency generator, or simply a Rife machine, as the UK research charity CRUK describes it.

The name now covers three different things. There are machines for home use, which pass weak electrical pulses through pads under the hands or feet, or through hand-held plasma tubes (CRUK). There are lists of numbers, each tied to a named complaint. And there are videos that play those numbers as sound. They share a name and a number, not a mechanism, as the sections below show.

What did Rife claim?

Two things. First, that his microscopes could show living microbes far smaller than any ordinary microscope could, each in its own colour. In 1931 Rife and Arthur Kendall, a bacteriologist at Northwestern University Medical School, described "turquoise-blue bodies" seen through a Rife microscope that "magnifies from 5,000 to 17,000 diameters", and took them for a filterable form of the typhoid bacillus (Kendall and Rife).

Second, that each microbe has its own vibratory rate, and that radio energy at exactly that rate would destroy it "in a manner similar to an opera singer's voice breaking a crystal glass". That is how a 1994 review of electronic devices, in the clinicians' journal CA, summed up the claim, and it answered the analogy in one line: "Although sound waves can produce vibrations that will break glass, radio waves cannot destroy bacteria due to their low energy level" (the 1994 review).

Could Rife's microscope see what he described?

Not by the physics of light. A light microscope cannot separate details closer together than about half the wavelength of the light it uses. Ernst Abbe set out that limit in 1873, and the 2014 Nobel announcement states it plainly: traditional optical microscopy "could never become better than 0.2 micrometres". Getting past it took fluorescent molecules and lasers, and won that year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry (Nobel Prize press release).

Magnification has a matching ceiling. Microscopists put the most useful magnification at about 1,000 times a lens's numerical aperture, the measure of how much light it gathers. Beyond that the image only grows larger, "with no corresponding increase in detail resolution": empty magnification (MicroscopyU). The best lens listed for Rife's largest microscope, the universal microscope, was an oil-immersion lens of aperture 1.25, so its useful limit was about 1,250 times. For a lens of that aperture, MicroscopyU's own table gives the finest detail it can resolve as 0.22 micrometres (MicroscopyU).

The figures printed for the universal microscope go far past both limits. A 1944 article in the Smithsonian Institution's annual report credited it with "a resolution of 31,000 diameters and magnification of 60,000 diameters", diameters meaning times: 48 times the useful limit of its best lens. It described forms "measuring less than one-twentieth of a micron", 0.05 micrometres, a quarter of the finest detail light can show. The same article put the electron microscope's resolution at 20,000 to 25,000 diameters, so by its own figures a light microscope was outdoing the electron microscope (Seidel and Winter).

Six bars: Rife's claimed 17,000, 31,000 and 60,000 times tower over 2,500 for an ordinary microscope and 25,000 for the electron microscope — The figures printed for Rife's microscopes in 1931 and 1944, in brown-red, beside the 1944 article's own figures for other microscopes. The dashed line marks about 1,250 times, the most the best lens on Rife's list could usefully magnify.

The numbers behind the chart, in diameters (times)
Microscope	Figure as printed	From
Ordinary light microscope	1,600 to 2,500	1944 report
Ultramicroscope	2,500 to 5,000	1944 report
Rife's microscope, magnification	5,000 to 17,000	1931 paper
Electron microscope, resolution	20,000 to 25,000	1944 report
Rife's universal microscope, resolution	31,000	1944 report
Rife's universal microscope, magnification	60,000	1944 report
Useful limit of its best lens, aperture 1.25	about 1,250	1,000 times its aperture

One line in that article shows the problem in miniature. Among the microscope's lenses it lists "a 1.12 dry lens". A numerical aperture is the refractive index of whatever sits in front of the lens multiplied by the sine of an angle, and the index of air is 1, so a lens working in air stays below 1. In practice, MicroscopyU notes, "it is difficult to achieve numerical aperture values above 0.95 with dry objectives" (MicroscopyU). If 1.12 is that lens's aperture, as its place beside the 1.16 water and 1.25 oil lenses suggests, no such dry lens can exist.

Other laboratories could not find the forms. In 1932 Charles Craig and Foster Johns, at Tulane University, grew four common bacteria in Kendall's medium, passed the cultures through bacteria-proof filters and tried to grow whatever came through: "In no instance did a growth of any of the 4 test organisms result" (Craig and Johns). Edward Rosenow of the Mayo Foundation, who did look through Rife's microscope, put its results down to the "ingenious methods employed rather than to excessively high magnification" (Seidel and Winter).

Where does the story of a 1934 trial come from?

The best-known part of the story is a test in 1934 that, its tellers say, succeeded and was then suppressed. It comes from a 1986 book by Barry Lynes, written with John Crane, which revived interest in Rife's device and says the reports of that test were "censored". The 1994 review read the book as "a mixture of historical documents and speculations selectively spun into a web far too complex to permit verification by anything short of an army of investigators with unlimited resources" (the 1994 review).

By 1991, the review adds, Rife devices "were being sold by a pyramid-like, multilevel marketing scheme in which users become salespeople sharing in each other's profits", with users' own testimonials as the main way to sell them. CRUK's reading of the claims made today is much the same: most are personal accounts. "They don't have any scientific research to back them up" (CRUK).

Where do Rife frequency lists come from?

One court case shows how such lists are used. In 2009 a federal jury in San Diego found James Folsom guilty on 26 felony counts over his sale of "Rife-type biofrequency devices". Each came with "an operating manual that set forth hundreds of digital settings for the device, directed to specific conditions from AIDS, diabetes, stroke, and ulcers to worms". He had bought more than 9,000 units, with sales of over $8 million, and the devices broke an FDA standard meant to keep lead wires that touch the body away from "potentially hazardous voltages" (United States Attorney, Southern District of California).

Nothing in the scientific record ties a number on such a list to a microbe. The ALSUntangled review called Rife's "identification of specific frequencies for pathogens" unproven and highly implausible (ALSUntangled). That is why this page prints no list: each number on one is a claim that a device can reach a named illness, and none has been shown to.

Are Rife frequencies sound?

Not in the way Rife meant them. His machine sent out radio-frequency energy, and the machines sold today pass electrical pulses through pads or tubes (CRUK). A Rife frequency video can send you only sound and light. So one number can name two quite different waves.

Sound is a pressure wave in the air. On a standard day at sea level it travels at about 761 miles an hour (NASA), roughly 340 metres a second, so a 1,000 Hz tone makes waves about 34 cm long. A radio wave is an electromagnetic wave and travels at the speed of light, exactly 299,792,458 metres a second (NIST), so a 1,000 Hz radio wave is about 300 km long, nearly 900,000 times longer. Your ears hear the first and cannot hear the second.

Over one metre, a 1,000 Hz sound wave in air makes three brown-red waves, each about 34 cm long, while a 1,000 Hz radio wave is a flat line — The same 1,000 Hz drawn as a sound wave in air and as a radio wave, to one scale. Over a metre the sound makes three waves; the radio wave, about 300 km from crest to crest, barely begins to bend.

So a Rife frequency played as sound is not what Rife described, even on his own terms. And on those terms, the 1994 review's note stands: radio waves at these energies cannot destroy bacteria.

Do microbes have a resonant frequency at all?

In a physical sense, yes, but nowhere near the numbers on a Rife list. A virus particle is a tiny elastic body, and like any object it has ways of vibrating. In 2015 a team at National Taiwan University showed that microwaves near 8 GHz, eight billion cycles a second, can drive one of those vibrations in influenza viruses, which they call "the confined acoustic dipolar mode". At that frequency, microwave power below the IEEE safety limit for public spaces was enough to inactivate the virus samples, "mainly through physically fracturing the virus structure" (Yang and colleagues).

8 GHz is eight million times 1,000 Hz, and it reached the virus as a microwave, not as sound. The result came from virus samples under an antenna in a laboratory; it says nothing about a sound, or about a person.

What do reviews and regulators say?

Those who have looked at the whole story agree. The ALSUntangled review series, which grades the evidence for alternative therapies, concluded in 2014 that "Rife's microscope technology, his identification of specific frequencies for pathogens, and the ability of Rife radio frequency machines to kill pathogens, are all unproven and highly implausible", and graded the idea's mechanism F (ALSUntangled).

CRUK says the Rife machine "hasn't been through the usual process of scientific testing", that the claims made for it are mostly personal accounts, and that there have been "some reports of electrical shocks and rashes". It notes laboratory work and one small study with other low-energy waves on tumours, and adds that "the electromagnetic frequencies used in this research were not the same as those of Rife machines". The machines themselves cost "hundreds to thousands of pounds" (CRUK).

Is it safe to listen to Rife frequency videos?

As sound, a Rife frequency video is simply a tone, with the ordinary risks of any audio: how loud, and for how long. The World Health Organization puts safe listening at 80 dB for up to 40 hours a week, and suggests keeping your device at no more than 60 per cent of its maximum volume (WHO, safe listening). The machines are a different matter, with the shocks and rashes CRUK reports, and the 1994 review warned of a further harm from devices like these: delay in proper care.

What plays on this page?

Harmonance plays no Rife frequencies and will not make one: a sound sold on a claim like this is exactly what the site refuses to make. The player at the top plays 174 Hz, the lowest of the nine Solfeggio tones, as a plain, steady tone with no promise attached. Listen if you are curious, notice what you notice, and stop whenever you like. The 174 Hz page plays it on its own, the Solfeggio collection holds the other eight, and the guide to Solfeggio frequencies tells where those numbers come from.

For what sound really does to matter, the guide to cymatics shows a vibrating plate arranging sand into patterns, and the science of sound healing sets out what research on listening does and does not show. The Schumann resonance guide checks another famous number against its source.

Sources and limits

This page sets what Rife and his supporters claimed, in their own 1931 and 1944 accounts, beside what reviewers, a prosecutor's release and the physics of light and sound say. The story of a 1934 test rests on a 1986 book that the 1994 review could not verify. The chart repeats the 1931 and 1944 figures as printed: diameters was then the usual word for times, and the 1944 figure for an ordinary microscope runs above the useful limit microscopists give today. The diagram uses the speed of sound on a standard day at sea level, so in a warmer room each sound wave is a little longer.