Tesla Predicts Fuelless Plan Without Engine

"Wizard of Wireless" Says Radio Force Will Furnish Both Power and Direction for Airships of Future

Will Also Irrigate Deserts

Inventor in His Birthday Review Gives Hint of Greatest Invention Ever Made

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 circle the earth, in the opinion of Tesla, inventor of the alternating current 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 points they are needed.

The moisture of the air, 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 snuff out of existence every enemy airship that appears upon the horizon.

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

Will Be "Greatest Invention"

"I have already demonstrated experimentally that I can transmit power by wireless half way around the earth without losing one-half of one per cent of it," Dr. Tesla said. "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, Jugoslavia). 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 Falls, I was struck by the realization of what in my boyhood would have been considered the wildest dream."

Born on Stroke of Midnight

Dr. Tesla was not certain that he was justified in giving out a birthday interview yesterday.

"Like Alexander," he said, "I was born exactly at midnight on July 10, so that I either have no birthday at all or two of them.

"Really, I cannot compel myself to believe that I am seventy-one years old, for my body is still as light and supple as a cat's, and I work with the same mental vigor of forty years ago. Some of my ancestors lived to 120 years, and one of them was 129 years old. I am firmly resolved to go him one better."

Discussing the "death ray," the inventor asserted that he discovered a ray capable of decomposing matter twenty-five years ago and would have made it public then had he not discovered something better, which he hopes to give to the world in the near future.