The Invention of Everything Else

by SamanthaHunt (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2008

  $9.45

  In The Invention of Everything Else , Samantha Hunt fictionalises the story of the Serbian-born scientist Nikola Tesla, inventor of radio and creator of AC electricity, a notoriously marginalised genius whose wild eccentricities, including obsessive-compulsive disorder and germ-phobia, have made him a counter culture icon, but who faded into obscurity in his final years and died in poverty, suspected of anti-American sentiment. His carelessness about protecting his ideas through patents meant that he was eclipsed in reputation by Thomas Edison and Marconi, both of whom built fortunes by stealing Tesla's ideas. The Invention of Everything Else revolves around the twin poles of the inventor, and Louisa, a highly sensitive and imaginative young woman who encounters Tesla at the end of his life. It is also a novel about a father and a daughter, a love story, a New York story, and a literary mystery. In this meticulously researched and biographically accurate novel, Samantha Hunt weaves these elements into a narrative that is buoyant, engaging, and triumphant. The Invention of Everything Else is a beautiful, moving, and thrilling exploration of human loneliness and isolation and the opposing power of emotional and scientific imagination.

• Used

  Paperback
  2009

  $3.21

  Louisa is an imaginative and curious chambermaid who, while cleaning rooms at the New Yorker Hotel, stumbles across a man living permanently in room 3327, which he has transformed into a scientific laboratory. Brought together by a shared interest in the pigeons that nest in the hotel, Louisa discovers that the mysterious guest is Nikola Tesla, one of the most brilliant - and most neglected - inventors of the twentieth century. The Invention of Everything Else charts the relationship of the girl and the genius during the last week of Tesla's life, when sinister forces are closing in on him. As well as being an engaging literary mystery, this exceptional novel movingly tells the life story of this extraordinary man and also recounts the heartbreak and redemption of one ordinary family...