Cooing for a strange genius

BY MANUELA HOELTERHOFF | Bloomberg News

May 11, 2008

An enchanting new novel, "The Invention of Everything Else" by Samantha Hunt (Houghton Mifflin, $24), imagines the last weeks of the Serbian engineer and dreamer Nikola Tesla as he feeds his beloved pigeons and befriends an oddball chambermaid at the Hotel New Yorker in Manhattan.

Born in 1856, Tesla was too preoccupied and strange to extract the payments and recognition due to him as the inventor of alternating current and wireless technology. Only in 1943, the year he died, was he recognized as the inventor of the radio by the U.S. Supreme Court.

His questing spirit floats through Hunt's quirkily poetic story of an old eccentric in a dynamic new world he helped to create.

It took our High Hats to credit him with the radio?

Partly it had to do with some sort of racism between the wars. He's Serbian. He had a very funny accent. Something crucial to understanding him is that he didn't care much for money. He didn't protect his patents and wasn't really in it in the same way [Thomas] Edison was, where he was really all about marketing and about making money.

Your novel is set mostly in the New Yorker hotel on 34th Street and Eighth Avenue, a very modern place with such unusual fixtures as a skating rink, an operating room, an acre-size kitchen.

In the '60s and '70s it closed for a couple of years. Curiously, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon bought it, and it's still owned by the Unification Church. They recently did a huge renovation and went back to the original Art Deco plans. I just spent the night in Tesla's room and got to take a bath in his tub.

And that's Room 3327?

Yes. He had an obsession with the number 3. Ever since he moved to America, he only lived in hotel rooms, and every room had to be somehow divisible by 3.

He had a lot of strange obsessions.

He had germ phobia at the end of his life. He couldn't stand the touch of human hair, or pearl earrings would set his teeth on edge.

Curiously, he loved pigeons.

Yes, that's one of the greatest paradoxes of him, that he couldn't stand to touch humans, but he would allow New York City's filthiest pigeons to live in his room. He would nurse sick ones back to health. And there was even one bird, of course, that he described as being his wife. He said that when she died, the inventive spirit left him.

The heroine is a feisty chambermaid, Louisa, who, though told not to disturb him, finally peeks in. She befriends him, feeds his pigeons and notices a hole in the wall: He's being spied on.

It was rumored one of the projects he was working on at the end of his life was a "death ray." And his papers were confiscated and taken by the government after his death.

The FBI?

The FBI and the Department of Alien Property, yes. Even though he wasn't an alien but a citizen.

Was he working on a death ray?

He did a lot of inventing in his head. Since the time he was a child, he had visions, and he saw almost all of his inventions functioning in his head. He thought it was too dangerous to write things down.

What drew you to Tesla?

I never had heard about him through 20 years of an American education. And so when I finally did stumble on him, I was quite surprised to learn that he had invented AC and the wireless.

And then I learned that when he was 8 years old he created an engine that was powered by June beetles. And I thought, "Oh, boy, this man is so creative."

He had plans to build a ring around the equator so that just by staying stationary, you would be able to travel around the world in 24 hours. And plans that almost seem like dreams. He had plans to photograph thought. He thought, well, thought is electrical energy, and we record electrical energy all the time. Why shouldn't we be able to photograph it?