The Invention of Everything Else
Samantha Hunt

Reviewed by Emily Eavis

Set in New York and focused around the extraordinary life and inventions of Serbian scientist Nikolai Tesla, this novel provides a real insight into a tragic tale of an original thinker being overtaken by others who, because he didn’t bother to patent them, stole his ideas, and made money from them when he didn’t. But The Invention of Everything Else is much more than a fictionalised biography. It’s also a thoroughly original novel, packed with fantasy and imagery that burst out at every corner.

We meet Tesla, the inventor of radio and AC (alternating current) electricity, in 1943, when he’s eighty-six, penniless and holed up on the thirty-third floor of the Hotel New Yorker, where he’s lived for ten years, in a room packed with old papers, inventions (along one wall he’s built ‘seventy-seven fifteen-inch-tall drawers as well as a number of smaller cubbyholes to fill up the odd spaces’). On his window ledge, he keeps ‘a small infirmary for injured and geriatric pigeons, who he feeds, cares for, converses with and loves.

It’s pigeons as well as place (and radio) that link him with the book’s other main character, the dangerously curious – and entirely fictional – Louisa, a chamber maid at the Hotel New Yorker who, when diverted from her usual pitch to Tesla’s room, can’t help but leaf through his private papers. Louisa lives with her father, Walter, a homing pigeon enthusiast in a small house with an aviary on the roof and thinks of herself as a ‘sharp city girl, frank, sceptical, and wise, with a desperate weakness for corny radio tales.’ Walter still misses Louisa’s mother, Freddie, who died giving birth to Louisa. So when his almost lifelong best friend, Azor, who’d disappeared two years previously, bursts back into his life claiming to have invented a time machine, he can’t wait to try it… Louisa, meanwhile, has met a young man – Arthur – on the train, who claims to remember her from school. Although she has no recollection of him, she finds him magnetically attractive.

As you can probably tell from this, Samantha Hunt has woven the facts about Tesla’s life and inventions in with several imaginative subplots to create a gloriously hallucinogenic work of fiction, which really pulls you into a crazy, chaotic world in which you feel almost anything might be possible – even a time machine!

I loved the quirkiness of character throughout this book and found it refreshing to read about such an admirable mind as Tesla’s. I felt so much for the characters and particularly enjoyed the relationship that develops between Tesla and Louisa, who loves hearing his tales and with whom he engages in a solid friendship (and a daily walk to Bryant Park to check in on the pigeons!).

It is thoroughly addictive reading and therefore comes highly recommended…