Category: Samantha Hunt

Littoral, the blog of the Key West Literary Seminar, has plenty of coverage to check out from last month’s event: audio of a lecture by Allan Gurganus, photos of Gore Vidal in a good mood, and more quips and reports. I’m especially amused by a comment by Samantha Hunt, who during the KWLS explained the genesis of her 2008 novel about the life of Nikola Tesla, The Invention of Everything Else:

[S]he was at a museum exhibit that included a reference to Alessandro Volta, realized she didn’t know much about him and should look him up when she returned home. But once in front of her computer, she found herself instead looking up Nikola Tesla, the man who invented radio and AC electrical technology and is at the center of her novel. She said she thinks she looked up Tesla because she was thinking of “the 90s hair metal band.” “I actually sent them copies of the book, but never heard back from them,” she said.

Bloomberg News catches up with Samantha Hunt, author of The Invention of Everything Else, a novel about the final days of Nikola Tesla. (It’s a great premise that I wish was better executed.) The end of the conversation between her and Bloomberg’s Manuela Hoelterhoff:

Hoelterhoff: What drew you to Tesla?

Hunt: 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 was thinking about wind power, thinking about solar power, thinking about batteries that are far, far more efficient than the batteries that we even have here 110 years later. 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?