"Damn Good Man"

Manhattan newsgatherers went last week, as they have gone annually for many a year, to interview Nikola Tesla on his birthday. This year it was his 71st birthday but Nikola Tesla said nothing that he had not said on his 61st birthday--or his 41st for that matter.

Nikola Tesla, genius extraordinary of electricity, predicted last week as he has been predicting since 1895 or so that enormous stores of power will some day be broadcast by radio; when that is possible, that airplanes will need no fuel. They will fly indefinite lengths of time on current flashed to them from any distance.

In 1893-four years before Guglielmo Marconi took out patents in Britain-Nikola Tesla patented in the U. S. a system of wireless transmission. A scarehead newspaper heard his prophecy that soon ships at sea would call electrically for help, to other ships or shore stations, without having any wired connection. The scarehead editor, well aware of his sheet's reputation, said: "We could not afford to print such a piece of inventive lunacy."

Though radio was not among them, inventive lunacies had filled Nikola Tesla's head when he was younger. Before he left his native village to study at an academy in Croatia he dreamed of constructing a submarine tube for carrying letters and packages under the Atlantic between Europe and the U. S. He thought the rotating planets might be harnessed to produce power.

The adolescent boy who had these highflown fancies was subject to waking visions that almost amounted to seizures. In the grown youth, an intense, ascetic student of electro-dynamics whose extravagant notions of planet power had given place to practical work on telephones, this visionary weakness became translated into an extraordinary ability to visualize, in minutest detail and exact dimensions, new mechanical devices sprung from an inventive brain.

It was while walking in a park and quoting Goethe to a friend that Nikola Tesla "saw" the induction motor that first brought him fame. He was able to draw it with a stick on the sandy path in the exact detail with which he presented it, six years later, to the American Institute of Electrical Engineers.

Thomas Edison's European agent was the man who brought the young Tesla to the U. S. After his first job for Mr. Edison--an all-night job putting a steamer's lighting plant in commission--Mr. Edison ejaculated to an associate: "This is a damn good man!"

As his fame spread, Mr. Tesla grew more and more wedded to his work. He never took a wife. Before he was 40 he had revolutionized power transmission machines and Lord Kelvin had said of him that he had contributed more to electrical science than any other man. He worked, as he still does, early and late at his laboratory in West 40th St., Manhattan, dining alone at the same hour, at the same table in the Waldorf.

Sometimes he visits his experimental plants in Colorado and on Long Island. Six years ago he said: "The matter of transmitting power by wireless is now so well in hand that I can say I am ready now to transmit 100,000 horsepower by wireless without a loss of more than 5% in transmission. The plant required to transmit this amount will be much smaller than some of the wireless telegraph plants now existing and will cost only $10,000,000, including water development and electrical apparatus. The effect will be the same whether the distance is one mile or 10,000 miles and the power can be collected high in the air, underground or on the ground."

How soon such a Tesla plant will be built is problematical. When it is built--or when, as may be possible, a pair of Tesla plants is built so huge that they will supply every power need on earth--the Tesla vision is this: ". . . You will be able to go anywhere in the world--to the mountain top over-looking your farm, to the Arctic or to the desert--and set up a little equipment that will give you heat to cook with and light to read by. This will be carried in a satchel not as big as the ordinary suitcase.

Automobiles, locomotives, ocean vessels, airplanes, dirigibles--all will have their power-receiving apparatus and all draw power from a globe-blanket of high-frequency induction currents.

That such a blanket of current would not be detrimental to health can be believed by friends of Mr. Tesla's who have seen a most appropriate photograph of him sitting in a zone of 25-foot electric sparks in his laboratory, calmly reading.