Tesla, 81 Today, Gives World Cheap Substitute for Radium

Nikola Tesla, who celebrates each birthday by producing an invention, popped up with another today because he's 81.

The slender wizard, credited with 700 inventions, including the electric motor, the radio, in which he preceded Marconi, and the arc light, in which he preceded Edison, announced that for this birthday he had invented a device to break up atoms and produce a "cheap substitute for radium."

Tesla wondered how the world would receive this newest product of his fertile brain.

"They laughed in 1896 when I told them about the cosmic ray." he said. "They jeered 35 years ago when I discovered the rotating field principle for alternating currents. They called me crazy when I predicted the radio, and when I sent the first impulse around the world they said it couldn't be done."

Tesla — he calls himself a practical man, not a scientist — said his life was "dedicated to annihilating distance."

At a luncheon today Tesla was to receive from the ministers of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia the Order of the White Eagle and the Order of the White Lion.