Dr. Tesla, at 77, Seldom Sleeps

Inventor Says His Health and Mind Are Better Than Ever — Expects to Live Beyond 140.

WORKING ON A NEW STEEL

To Be Twice as Strong as at Present — Assails 'Pad and Pencil Scientists.'

Nikola Tesla, dean of American inventors, with a hundred triumphs in electrical engineering behind him, was 77 years old yesterday. In an interview at the Hotel Governor Clinton, where he lives, he said he was in better health and more alert mentally than ever before in his life...

He sketched the regimen by which he expects to live scores of years more. It includes virtually no sleep and rigidly limited meals. He also told of further work on inventions that he believes may revolutionize the world.

On his birthday last year Dr. Tesla announced he was working on a new source of energy, but yesterday he said he had concentrated, for financial reasons, on work in molecular physics. He was confident it would make possible the economical production of enormously improved metals. His researches would apply to all metals, but principally steel, he said.

"I am hoping to produce a steel, at the same cost as present steel, so much better that a building such as the Empire State could be built with one-half the amount of steel now required. Think of the saving that would mean. When it is perfected and in commercial production I should be one of the biggest taxpayers in the United States."

Scoffs at Modern Scientists.

Dr. Tesla said present-day atomic theories were all wrong and were the product of "pad and pencil scientists," who deduced and de- duced, and when they finished, had a grain of truth and 95 per cent of illusion. "The scientists, from Franklin to Morse, were clear thinkers and did not produce erroneous theories," Dr. Tesla said.

"The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane. "The scientists of today have substituted mathematics for experiments and they wander off through equation after equation and eventually build a mathematical structure which has no relation to reality. They are metaphysicians rather than scientists."

Dr. Tesla said he ate two meals a day, the first consisting largely of fats to provide fuel for the day's work, the evening meal of proteins to rebuild the body tissues. He does not use coffee and tea and considers them dangerous poisons. He regards alcohol in moderation as virtually an elixir of life. Asked about how many hours a day he works, Dr. Tesla said the part of his mind that solves scientific problems works incessantly.

Says He Rarely Sleeps.

And as to how many hours he sleeps —

"Oh, I don't sleep," he said.

Sleep, he implied, is a racial habit growing out of the fact that we spend half our life in darkness because of the rotation of the earth. With a diet from which poisonous substances are excluded, he thinks, one might live virtually without sleep and attain very great age.

"Sometimes I doze for an hour or so," he said, "and once in a long time — perhaps once in a year — I have a long sleep of five, six or seven hours. When I awake from that I am so full of energy that I have to work it off."

At 77, Dr. Tesla still sees the best part of his life ahead of him.

"I expect to beat the record of my ancestors, some of whom lived to be 140," he remarked.