Fuelless Plane, Without Engine, Seen by Inventor

Aircraft of Future Will Take Energy From Air, Tesla Predicts.

New York, July 12 — Soon airplanes and airships, unhampered by heavy, engines and tanks of fuel but propelled instead, by light electric motors receiving their power by wireless transmission from generating stations on the earth will some day circle the earth, in the opinion of Nikola Tesla, inventor of the alternating system of power transmission.

In the future power for manufacturing and for light and heat will flow freely through the air from central generating stations to whatever spot it is needed.

The moisture of the alr, obedient to human control through touch of air-piercing electrical current, will cause deserts to bloom, he says, and a wireless directed force, far more powerful than the so-called "death ray," will enable battleships to shuff out of existence every enemy airship that appears upon the horizon.

These are a few of the developments the perfection of wireless transmission will soon bring to a pioneer in wireless development, the inventor, really Mr. Tesla, of the induction motor, predicted yesterday in an interview given on the occasion of his seventy-first birthday.

"I have already demonstrated experimentally that I can transmit power by wireless halfway around the earth without losing one-half of one per cent. of it," Dr. Tesla sald. "I hope in time to put up my power plant to give to the world my best invention, the one which will survive all others."

"My life has been so wonderful that it almost surpasses anything in fiction," he said with conviction, "because every great desire I have ever had has invariably materialized.

"When I was about nine years old I used to construct little water turbines in the streams that rushed down the mountains near my home (he was born in Smiljan, Yugoslavia). On one occasion I told my uncle, a Metropolitan of the Greek church, that some day I would put a water wheel in Niagara Falls, about which I had read. So, in 1895, when I saw my turbines in operation in Niagara Falls, I was struck by the realization of what in my boyhood would have been considered the wildest dream."