Deemed by biographer Robert Lomas as “the man who invented the 20th century,” Nikola Tesla was one of the world’s most revolutionary and famed electrical engineers. He is a captivating if not puzzling figure, whose interests ranged from electromagnetism to Vedic philosophy to pigeons. Samantha Hunt’s The Invention of Everything Else brilliantly resurrects Tesla’s stay at the Hotel New Yorker, where he lived out his last days. On New Year’s Day 1943, Louisa, a young chambermaid, first encounters a luminous Tesla during a blackout at the hotel. She strikes up a friendship with the extraordinary inventor through their shared love of pigeons and begins to uncover his past. All the while, her romance with Arthur—a mechanic possibly from the future—buds, and her father’s impending departure in a time machine approaches. With The Invention of Everything Else Hunt celebrates the spirit of invention, and of life itself.
-Lisa Kunik

Lisa Kunik: The opening pages of The Invention of Everything Else transport the reader to an early twentieth century New York painted through a magical realist lens in which Nikola Tesla converses with pigeons. Likewise, your first novel The Seas embodies a magical spirit, that of the sea and mermaids. Has the realm of the magical always inspired your writing?

Samantha Hunt: I never think of it as magic or magical realism but I have always had an interest in mystery and those writers who, rather than solve mysteries, point out even larger ones — people like Haruki Murakami and Kelly Link. The world’s a mysterious place. Science and nature are stranger than any sort of magic or trickery. I’m very interested in the experiments being done by the British biologist Rupert Sheldrake. He studies things like why we know when someone is staring at us, or why, when we think of a long lost friend, very often he or she calls. He would like to demonstrate that these phenomena — that we all agree happen — are controlled not by coincidence or magic but by cells, biology. (He also happens to be doing experiments with pigeons and how they know the way home.) I like to think that’s the way I write as well.

LK: Your book is a fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla’s friendship with Louisa, a chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker. What could you accomplish in a work of fiction that you couldn’t in a nonfiction biography?

SH: There are many excellent biographies already written about Tesla. That has never been my interest. I’d hoped to suggest some broader truths than just the facts of his life. For example, where are the inventors of today? Where is the wonder that leads young people to develop teleportation devices in their basements? Has invention been crushed some by greed and capitalism?

LK: Were there other books capturing the life of a person or an event in the form of a fictional novel that you looked to in writing The Invention of Everything Else?

SH: I’d read and admired Rene Steinke’s Holy Skirts, Bruce Olds’ Bucking the Tiger, Joanna Scott’s Arrogance and W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn.

LK: Louisa snoops around Tesla’s room at the Hotel New Yorker only to find what appear to be journal entries or the makings of an autobiography. Were the recounted entries based on historically preserved documents, or were they a product of your writerly imagination? How did you manage to get inside the head of such a sparkling, larger-than-life character?

SH: The journal entries were pure imagination. Tesla did write an oddball autobiography published serially in Electrical Engineer magazine and that helped me. I read as much primary source material from him as I could find even some translations of Serbian poetry that he had done with Robert Underwood Johnson.

LK: When considering how pigeons—for which she and Tesla share a love— always find their way home, Louisa “realiz[es] that magic is a very unsatisfying reason for anything.” In scientific discovery and research there are always elements of artistic inspiration and creativity, which, very often, are informed by magic. Do science and the spirit of the magical coexist in the mind of the inventor?

SH: Again, I would hate to call it magic. Magic dismisses a lot of wonder due to the material world. Perhaps it is better to speak of curiosity or even love of the world. I think of the TV programs of David Attenborough. When I watch those and he reveals to me the mating habits of the scorpion or the mimicry of the lyrebird (http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=3433507052114896375), now that inspires me to creativity! Though certainly, in the mind of the inventor, there must also be some capacity for imagining what’s unimaginable.

LK: In the book, Tesla claims to have communicated with Martians. With such claims, one could easily write Tesla off as a mad scientist. But did Tesla’s spirit of infinite possibility allow him to realize his genius?

SH: He claimed it in real life also. Tesla certainly had a very open mind. Rather than thinking of him as a mad scientist (as sadly, many people have), I approached him as one who simply had less of a filter between his thoughts and his words. He said many of the things that everyone thinks. He had enormous powers of intuition that he wisely paid attention to. A highly sensitive man.

LK: The epigraph, “Everything that can be invented has been invented,” alludes to a human tendency to impose order on a universe we can’t possibly control or completely understand. But the human mind is naturally inquisitive; do you think this desire to create or invent is what makes us human?

SH: The drive to create certainly makes us human. Whether it be art, iPhones, or babies, creation makes us human, makes us happy because it links us to something infinite and unexplainable.

LK: Tesla claims, “Invention is nothing a man can own.” What do you think Tesla would say about our litigious society, specifically when it comes to issues of intellectual property?

SH: I think it would make him rather depressed. It does me, particularly when I try to imagine the future that Tesla envisioned for us, and how we have gotten so far away from that vision. I do, however, think that Tesla would love the opensourcers of today. I think he’d adore the internet.

LK: Tesla, at least as rendered in the book, lives in an isolated world where he communicates, for the most part, with pigeons. Does a degree of loneliness necessarily accompany genius?

SH: Tesla believed so. He said that writers and artists could have wives, but inventors could not. I think and hope that there are ways to get at this loneliness without necessarily being alone. Look at David Lynch with his passion for Transcendental Meditation. He dives into the gray matter of creativity daily while managing to have a family and human relationships. Perhaps it is more a matter of staying open and honest - these are hard things to do in relation with other humans. And certainly anyone who is trying to create needs space to let the mind go awandering. I myself like to write very, very early in the morning, before the world has woken up.

LK: Who are the Nikola Teslas of our time? In what form does his spirit manifest itself in our contemporary world?

SH: Certainly not with those toiling long hours in that battle to find another cure for erectile dysfunction! I find a lot of his spirit present in the DIY community as well as those folks innovating new and localized energy sources or coming from the art world, people such as Steve Kurtz. But probably the real Teslas out there today are quietly working in their garages. We haven’t heard of them. At least not yet.

Samantha Hunt has spent four years researching Nikola Tesla, in the course of which she has appeared in several Tesla-related documentaries, visited Tesla fanatics across the country, and explored the five subterranean floors of the still-standing Hotel New Yorker. She is the author of the acclaimed first novel The Seas, and her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and McSweeney’s and on This American Life. She recently received the first-ever “5 under 35″ award from the National Book Foundation.

Lisa Kunik is a Brooklyn-based writer originally from Los Angeles. Her interviews have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail and her short fiction on LostWriters.net.

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