The Invention of Everything Else is a luminous imagining of an unlikely friendship between the eccentric inventor, Nikola Tesla, and a young hotel chambermaid, Louisa, who is obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests. Louisa first catches sight of the hotel's most famous resident on New Year's Day, 1943, and is determined to befriend the strange man. As they share their mutual affinity for pigeons, Louisa begins to piece together Tesla's extraordinary story of life as an immigrant and visionary genius. Meanwhile, faced with her father's imminent departure in a time machine, as well as the unsettling arrival of Arthur, a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future), Louisa begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship of love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.