Another goodie from Amazon’s Vine programme was a book called The Invention of Everything Else by Samantha Hunt.  It is set in New York in 1943 and features the inventor Nikola Tesla, his encounter with Louisa, a chambermaid at the New Yorker Hotel where he lives, the life of Louisa and her father, and pigeons. Here is what I said about it:

I have a feeling this may be a bit of a ‘marmite book’ that is either going to grip you or totally turn you off. I’m lucky because, unlike Marmite itself which I can’t stand, I really enjoyed the book.

True, it does sometimes try to straddle too many genres, dipping into historical fiction, biography and even science fiction or ‘steampunk’ but it just manages to hold it together. The writing is technically very, very good, seamlessly swapping between first- and third- person from different perspectives, with stories within stories as the chambermaid Louisa reads papers and her reading matter takes over the book.

There are fascinating details of life in New York in the 1940s and earlier, and even more fascinating details of Tesla’s life. Some of the more unlikely details I supposed to be the product of the writer’s imagination but after a little looking up on the Internet I found that they were all documented real incidents. While I was at it I also looked up a bit of the history of the New Yorker hotel – don’t you love it when a book leads you to go off and do a bit of research?

Of course the big detail, which I won’t mention in case I spoil it for anyone, is pure imagination and a bit of a tease, hinting at directions that the book doesn’t actually go in. Strangely, that was part of the enjoyment: many times throughout the book I was speculating about where it would go and mentally writing my own alternative directions.

This book really does take unpredictability to new heights: you don’t just not know what will happen but don’t even know what genre it is going to happen in.

One consequence of reading this is that I realise I did not know nearly as much about Nikola Tesla as I should do, and it will probably lead me to one of the biographies mentioned in the acknowledgements section. If this book leads to a better awareness of Tesla generally it will be a good thing. The fact that it does it in such a readable way is a bonus.

Now I have finished it I can’t believe it is only 250 pages: there are so many incidents and ideas crammed into it, and many of them were launch pads for ideas of my own. I won’t go so far as to say that the book changed my life, but it made it more interesting for the duration.

One other thing I can add is the way the book made me think about electricity.  It is something we take for granted: it only takes a power cut to realise how much we rely on electricity but we rarely think about it.  This book spans the time when it was all new and not taken for granted at all, when there were major battles between rival advocates of AC and DC current, and when a double socket was advertised as the ideal Christmas gift and heralded as major advance in quality of life.

Has Tesla been a bit more selfish, or even just more inclined to look after his own interests he could have been better-known than Edison and Marconi put together, and had a Bill Gates sort of position in the business world of his time yet time and time again he gave away patents and let others get the credit and publicity for work made possible by him.  A fascinating character – advancing science and technology but describing himself as an engineer or inventor rather than a scientist.

At one point the book describes how Tesla has an invention sort of appear to him, fully formed in all its detail.  I must read a biography to see how much of the character was made up by the author, and how much taken from life.