Nikola Tesla is best remembered for inventing engines that produced alternating current (AC) electricity. AC, developed by Tesla and sold by his partner George Westinghouse, was a superior alternative to Thomas Edison’s direct current (DC). Edison, fearful that the comptetition would drive him out of business, staged a number of grisly experiments to “prove” that AC current was too dangerous for everyday use. Dogs, cats, horses, and eventually, heartbreakingly, a condemned rogue elephant named Topsy were all forced to stand on an electrified plate and “Westinghoused” to death. The sadistic PR campaign couldn’t stop a better technology, however, and eventually AC current became the standard.
Tesla was also the first person to produce artifical lightning, and invented wireless radio. But like many briliiant scientists, Tesla was no business man. Without patents for his inventions, the financial spoils went to other, better-known people. (Every time a children’s textbook refers to Edison and Marconi as the “inventors” of electricity and radio, Tesla must do another rotation in the grave.) Poor, dismissed as a crank, and mostly forgotten, Tesla lived out his final days as a long-term guest in Manhattan’s swank New Yorker Hotel, caring for Central Park pigeons, and working on plans for many more strange and shocking inventions. Upon his death, those plans were confiscated by the US government, declared classified, and then “lost.” Among his never-finished ideas was a means for harvesting the “free energy” given off by every living thing, which he hoped would provide a never ending, clean source of electric power. That, and a “death ray” that could destroy the universe. As you might imagine, those lost documents have been conspiracy theory fodder ever since. Who could make this stuff up?
Tesla’s name has graced a late ’90s hair metal band, and a high speed electric car. Lightning-producing Tesla coils have become a necessary staple in any film that features a mad scientist. David Bowie even played him in the movie The Prestige. But who was he really?
Of all the authors I admire, if I had to guess which one of them was going to write a fictionalized account of Nikola Tesla’s life, Samatha Hunt would not have been at the top of that list. Her first novel, The Seas, was a strange and beautiful monologue by a troubled young girl in a remote, unnamed seaside town. She is convinced that she is a mermaid. In one scene, she believes that King Neptune has washed up on the beach and is talking to her. Beautifully written tragedy ensues. Sad and poetic and incredibly strange, that book made me feel like I’d been pummeled by a particularly cold and strong wave.
The Seas took place in a world that didn’t need to be limited by the laws of physics or the constraints of actual history. The Invention of Everything Else, Hunt’s second book, required extensive research. All the most fascinating and bizarre tidbits in the book are invariably the ones that are based in fact. Tesla dreamed of building a stationary ring around the earth, to be used for ultra-fast world travel. A woman published a book during Tesla’s lifetime advancing a theory that he actually came from the planet Venus. In contrast, the purely fictional elements of the book seem, at times, too studied and too wooden, as though the effort of having to hew to reality was bogging down Hunt’s prodigious imagination.
