My Inventions and Other Writings

NIKOLA TESLA (1856–1943) was born in Smiljan (modern-day Croatia), but traveled to America in his youth and remained there, becoming a naturalized citizen in 1891. During his lifetime, he contributed immensely to the field of electrical engineering and is responsible for alternating current electricity, the bifilar coil, and the bladeless turbine. He was chiefly responsible for the invention of the radio due to his research on wireless communication devices. Although less well known than his contemporaries Edison and Marconi, Tesla surpassed both with his contributions to modern science. Supposedly because of his competitive relationship with Edison—and their mutual inclination to discredit each other at every chance—both were passed over for the Nobel Prize; Marconi received the prize for physics for his invention of radio in 1909 (after Tesla’s death in 1943, his patent on radio was finally upheld by the Supreme Court, a ruling that served as the basis for patented radio technology in the United States). Troubled by phobias and, possibly, obsessive compulsive disorder, Tesla lived out the last ten years of his life in solitude at the Hotel New Yorker. He died in 1943, in debt despite his numerous scientific contributions and patents.

SAMANTHA HUNT is the author of two novels, The Seas, for which she received the “5 under 35” Award from the National Book Foundation, and The Invention of Everything Else, short-listed for the Orange Prize for fiction. She writes fiction for The New Yorker and is fascinated by the life of Nikola Tesla, the subject of her novel The Invention of Everything Else.