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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.