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, obsessed with radio dramas and the secret lives of the hotel guests, 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 the story of Tesla's extraordinary 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 a mysterious mechanic (perhaps from the future) named Arthur, Louisa begins to suspect that she has understood something about the relationship between love and invention that Tesla, for all his brilliance, never did.