Einstein Turning Fifty
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Germany. He grew up in a Jewish family. His father, Hermann Einstein, was a salesman and engineer.
Faced with military duty when he turned of age, Einstein withdrew from classes, using a doctor’s note to excuse himself and claim nervous exhaustion. After graduating, Einstein faced major challenges in finding academic positions, having isolated some professors by not attending class more regularly instead of studying independently.
Einstein found steady work in 1902 after receiving a referral for a clerk position in a Swiss patent office. While working at the patent office, Einstein had the time to further explore ideas that had taken hold during his university studies and thus cemented his theorems on what would be known as the principle of relativity.
In 1905—seen by many as a “miracle year” for the theorist—Einstein had four papers published in the Annalen der Physik, one of the best-known physics journals of the era. Two focused on the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion. The two others, which outlined E=MC2 and the special theory of relativity, were defining Einstein’s career and the course of the study of physics.
Albert Einstein was a German mathematician and physicist who developed the special and general theories of relativity. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In the following decade, he settled in the United States after being targeted by the German Nazi Party. His work also had a major impact on the development of atomic energy. Albert Einstein was a physicist and one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century.
As a physicist, Einstein had many discoveries, but he is perhaps best known for his theory of relativity and the equation E=MC2, which foreshadowed the development of atomic power and the atomic bomb.
In 1921, Einstein won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, since his ideas on relativity were still considered questionable. He wasn’t given the award until the following year due to a technical ruling, and during his acceptance speech, he still opted to speak about relativity.
Einstein married Mileva Maric on January 6, 1903. While attending school in Zurich, Einstein met Maric, a Serbian physics student. Einstein continued to grow closer to Maric, but his parents were strongly against the relationship due to her ethnic background.
Nonetheless, Einstein continued to see her, with the two developing a correspondence via letters in which he expressed many of his scientific ideas. Einstein’s father passed away in 1902, and the couple married shortly thereafter.
Einstein and Mavic had three children. Their daughter, Lieserl, was born in 1902 before their wedding and might have been later raised by Maric’s relatives or given up for adoption. Her fate and whereabouts remain a mystery. The couple also had two sons: Hans Albert Einstein, who became a well-known hydraulic engineer, and Eduard “Tete” Einstein, who was diagnosed with schizophrenia as a young man.
The Einsteins’ marriage would not be a happy one, with the two divorcing in 1919 and Maric having an emotional breakdown in connection to the split. Einstein, as part of a settlement, agreed to give Maric any funds he might receive from possibly winning the Nobel Prize in the future.
During his marriage to Maric, Einstein had also begun an affair sometime earlier with a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. The couple wed in 1919, the same year as Einstein’s divorce. He would continue to see other women throughout his second marriage, which ended with Löwenthal’s death in 1936.
Einstein's house in Caputh near Berlin
Einstein wanted some solitude for his fiftieth birthday, a refuge from publicity. So, in March 1929 he fled once again, as he had during the publication of his unified field theory paper of a few months earlier, to the gardener's cottage of an estate on the Havel River owned by Janos Plesch, a flamboyant and gossipy Hungarian-born celebrity doctor who had added Einstein to his showcase collection of patients- friends.
For days he lived by himself, cooking his own meals, while journalists and official well-wishers searched for him. His whereabouts became a matter of newspaper speculation. Only his family and assistant knew where he was, and they refused to tell even close friends.
Early on the morning of his birthday, he walked from this hideaway, which had no phone, to a nearby house to call Elsa. She started to wish him well on reaching the half-century mark, but he interrupted.
"Such a fuss about a birthday," he laughed. He was phoning about a matter involving physics, not merely personal. He had made a mall mistake in some calculations he had given to his assistant Walther Mayer, he told her, and he wanted her to take down the corrections and pass them along.
Elsa and her daughters came out that afternoon for a small, private celebration. She was dismayed to find him in his oldest suit, which they had hidden. "How did you manage to find it?" she asked, "Ah," he replied, "I know all about those hiding places."
The New York Times, as brave as ever, was the only paper that managed to track him down. A family member later recalled that Einstein's angry look drove the reporter away. That was not true. The reporter was smart and Einstein, despite his feigned fury, was as accommodating as usual. "Einstein Is Found Hiding on His Birthday” was the paper's headline. He showed the reporter a microscope he had been given as a gift, and the paper reported that he was like a "delighted boy" with a new toy.’
From around the world came other gifts and greetings. The ones that moved him the most were ordinary people. A seamstress had sent him a poem, and an unemployed man had saved a few coins to get him a small packet of tobacco. The latter gift brought tears to his eyes and was the first for which he wrote a thank-you letter.
Another birthday gift caused more problems. The city of Berlin, at the suggestion of the ever-meddling Dr Plesch, decided to honour its most famous citizen by giving him lifelong rights to live in a country house that was part of a large lakeside estate that the city had acquired. There he would be able to escape, sail his wooden boat, and scribble his equations in serenity.
It was a generous and gracious gesture. It was also a welcome one. Einstein loved sailing and solitude and simplicity, but he owed no weekend retreat and had to store his sailboat with friends. He was thrilled to accept.
The house, in a classical style, was nestled in a park near the village of Cladow on a lake of the Haval River. Pictures of it appeared in the papers and a relative called it “the ideal residence for a person of creative intellect and a man fond of sailing.” But when Elsa went to inspect it, she found still living there the aristocratic couple who sold the estate to the city. They claimed that they had retained the right to live on the property. A study of the documents proved them right, and they could not be evicted.
So, the city decided to give the Einsteins another part of the estate on which they could build their own home. But that, too, violated the city's purchase agreement. Pressure and publicity only hardened the resolve of the original family to block the Einsteins from building on the land, and it became an embarrassing front-page fiasco, especially after a third suggested alternative also proved unsuitable.
Finally, it was decided that the Einsteins should simply find their own piece of land, and the city would buy it. So, Einstein picked out a parcel, owned by some friends, farther out of town near a village just south of Potsdam called Caputh. It was in a sylvan spot between the Havel and a dense forest, and Einstein loved it. The mayor accordingly asked the assembly of city deputies to approve spending 20,000 marks to buy the property as the fiftieth birthday gift to Einstein.
A young architect drew up plans, and Einstein bought a small garden plot nearby. Then politics intervened. In the assembly, the right-wing German Nationalists objected, delayed the vote, and insisted that the proposal be put on a future agenda for a full debate. It became clear that Einstein personally would become the focus of that debate.
So, he wrote a letter, mingled with amusement, declining the gift. "Life is very short," he told the mayor, “While the authorities work slowly. My birthday is already past, and I decline the gift." The headline the next day in the Berliner Tageblatt newspaper read, "Public Disgrace Complete / Einstein Declines."
By this point, the Einsteins had fallen in love with the plot of land in Kaputh, negotiated its purchase, and had a design for a house to build upon it. So, they went ahead and bought it with their own money. “We have spent most of our savings, Elsa complained, but we have our land.”
The house they built was simple, with polished wood Pannell’s inside and unvarnished planks showing to the outside. Through a large picture, the true window was a serene view of Havel. Marcel Bruder, the famed furniture designer, had offered to do the interior designs.
Einstein was a man of conservative tastes. "I am not going to sit on furniture that continually reminds me of a machine shop or a hospital operating room," he said. Some leftover heavy pieces from the Berlin apartment were used instead.
Einstein's room on the ground floor had a spartan wooden table, a bed, and a small portrait of Isaac Newton. Elsa's room was also downstairs, with a shared bathroom between them. Upstairs there were small rooms with sleeping niches for her two daughters and their maid. "I like living in the new little wooden house enormously, even though I am broke as a result," he wrote to his sister shortly after moving in. "The sailboat, the sweeping view, the solitary fall walks, the relative quiet is a paradise."
There he sailed the new twenty-three-foot boat his friends had given him for his birthday, the Tümmler, or Dolphin, which was built fat and solid to his specifications. He liked to go out on the water alone, even though he didn't swim. "He was absurdly happy as soon as he reached the water," recalled a visitor. For hours he would let the boat drift and glide aimlessly as he gently toyed with the rudder. "His scientific thinking, which never leaves him even on the water, takes on the nature of a daydream," according to one relative. "Theoretical thinking is rich in imagination."?
Throughout Einstein's life, his relationships with women seemed subject to untamed forces. His magnetic appeal and soulful manner repeatedly attracted women. And even though he usually shielded himself from entangling commitments, he occasionally found himself caught in the swirl of a passionate attraction, just as he had been with Mileva Marić and even Elsa.
In 1923, after marrying Elsa, he fell in love with his secretary, Betty Neumann. Their romance was serious and passionate, according to newly revealed letters. That fall, while on a visit to Leiden, he wrote to suggest that he might take a job in New York, and she could come as his secretary. She would live there with him and Elsa, he fantasized. "I will convince my wife to allow this," he said. "We could live together forever. She replied by riding both him and the idea, which prompted him to concede how much of a "crazy ass" he had been. " You have more respect for the difficulties of triangular geometry than I, old mathematics, have.”
He finally terminated their romance with the lament that he "must seek in the stars" the true love that was denied to him on earth. "Dear Betty, laugh at me, the old donkey, and find somebody who is ten years younger than me and loves you just as much as I do."
But the relationship lingered. The following summer, Einstein went to see his sons in southern Germany, and from there he wrote to his wife that he could not visit her and her daughters, who were at a resort nearby because that would be "too much of a good thing." At the same time, he was writing Betty Neumann saying that he was going secretly to Berlin, but she should not tell anyone because if Elsa found out she "would fly back."
After he built the house in Caputh, a succession of women friends visited him there, with Elsa's grudging consent. Toni Mendel, a wealthy widow with an estate on the Wannsee, sometimes came sailing with him in Caputh, or he would pilot his boat up to her villa and stay late into the night playing the piano. They even went to the theatre together in Berlin occasionally. Once she picked Einstein up in her chauffeured limousine, Elsa got into a furious fight with him and would not give him any pocket money.
He also had a relationship with a Berlin socialite named Ethel Michanowski. She tagged along on one of his trips to Oxford, in May 1931, and stayed in a local hotel. He composed a five-line poem for her one day on a Christ Church college notecard. "Long branched and delicately strung, nothing that will escape her gaze," it began. A few days later she sent him an expensive present, which was not appreciated. "The small package angered me," he wrote. "You have to stop sending me presents incessantly... And to send something like that to an English college where we are surrounded by sense- less affluence anyway!"
Einstein died on April 18, 1955, at age 76 at the University Medical Center at Princeton.
References:
1.Albert Einstein: Biography, Physicist, Nobel Prize Winner
2. Walter Isaacson’s book.
