Science fiction is full of larger-than-life characters. But science fact has its share of giants, too.

Few of them loom as large as The Man Who Invented the Twentieth Century1: Nikola Tesla.

That's why his specter looms large in my novel, The Great War of the Worlds (GWOTW).

Tesla in his Colorado Springs laboratory, ca. 1899

There are plenty of books and movies that tell Telsa's story, so I won't delve into yet another too short biography here. I'd rather talk about Nikola Tesla and one of his friends, a fellow named Samuel Clemens.

That's right, Tesla didn't just know Mark Twain, they hung out. I found this surprising at first, but it make perfect sense when you think about it. Both men were 19th century celebrities and both were formidable personalities. Tesla's main lab was in New York City in the 1890s, and Twain visited the city often during that decade.

There are many stories about Tesla's "salons" and how he liked to show off his inventions. In one story, he cured Twain's constipation with a mechanical oscillator. In another (my absolute favorite) they played with a X-ray gun and used it to take images of each other's skulls.

Twain, with Telsa in the background.

I tripped over these stories as I was doing research for GWOTW. My book is an alternate history that starts deviating from ours with H.G. Wells' Martian attack. The War of the Worlds tells us the story of their attack in Great Britain, but figure they'd attack in more than one place, including in the United States.

If they're going to attack the U.S, they might as well attack Grover's Mill, New Jersey, right? It turns out the location of the Martian attack in Orson Welles' infamous retelling of The War of the Worlds is right next to Princeton, and only 20 miles from Menlo Park, where Thomas Edison built his famous laboratory.

Edison was a business insider, so it makes sense that he'd play a part in figuring out how Martian technology worked. But what about Tesla? He remained an outsider throughout his career, leaving Westinghouse soon after the "War of the Currents" and running an independent lab.

Would he end up locked out? What would a guy who claimed to have invented a death ray do if he got hands on Martian technology? How far would he go to get it?

My answers, play a significant role in the story. I'm in the midst of some intense editing right now, so more next week.

1

Not my term, even though it fits. It’s the title of a biography. (Affiliate link.)

Not the Car. The Other One.