High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! A tractor beam is a hypothetical device with the ability to attract one object to another from a distance. Since the 1990s, technology and research has laboured to make it a reality, mostly at microscopic level. Less commonly, a similar beam that repels is called a pressor beam or repulsor beam. Gravity impulse and gravity propulsion beams are areas of research from fringe physics that coincide with the concepts of tractor and repulsor beams.