Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  What did it mean? Stephen Voorhees, one of its designers, thought it represented the harnessing of electricity. Regardless of what anyone else, including Einstein, thought, the structure dominated the Production and Distribution Zone.

  Inside the hall, spectators stood along a balcony and overlooked what might have been the engine room of a great steamship. Groups of black, shiny columns ringed with bright silver bands stood at either end of the hall; most of the equipment and a large panel between the columns featured the ubiquitous, scripted GE logo. In between was a network of wires and scaffolding and electrodes that shouted a futuristic vision reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. Men in dark clothing raced back and forth, turning meaningless switches on a glowing instrument panel and shouting scientific-sounding gobbledygook to one another. Suddenly the lights faded and a single voice called out, “We are about to imitate Nature herself!”

  It all sounded very dangerous and very intimidating; some of the ladies buried their heads in their husbands’ lapels and covered their ears, readying themselves for the great explosion.

  “We are going to have a bit of lightning and a spot of thunder,” the voice teased. “Not enough to make your hair curl or deafen anybody, but enough for our purpose.”

  Then came the sales pitch. “By reproducing the conditions that exist in a real thunderstorm, General Electric tests its equipment,” the narrator continued. “They keep on functioning, whether it storms or not.”

  Glass tubes suddenly began to glow; a shot rang out, and then another: the signal to get ready. With a tremendous crash of thunder, the lightning streaked across the thirty-foot gap between the columns. It was a startling sight, made even more beautiful by the clever addition of various salts to add color to the show. So it was not merely plain old everyday lightning that visitors saw—GE was doing more than “imitating” nature; they were enhancing it. The bolts arced in dazzling displays of orange, green, yellow, and blue. And they certainly made a terrific bang. Everyone agreed on that.

  Most likely, Einstein and his party decided to skip the accompanying House of Magic, where steel bars floated in a sea of magnetic force and light talked. General Electric had taken the true science insult one step too far by featuring a “scientist-magician”2 who shook hands with his own shadow. It was a simple trick, but effective. An actor sat in front of a large screen coated with phosphorescent material. When the light was turned off, he got up and moved to a chair directly opposite, so that when the lights came back on, the image of his shadow remained in the space he had previously occupied. Then, by placing his hand in a similar position, he “shook hands” with it, slapped it on the back, and for a big finale he rolled it up and put it away.

  Scientist-magician indeed.

  But the Exhibits Hall displayed a huge mural by Rockwell Kent that was as brilliant as it was disturbing. Supposedly representing the progress mankind had made since the enlightenment of electrical power, a gleaming city—not unlike the Emerald City of that year’s The Wizard of Oz—shone underneath the godlike figures of a man and woman touching fingers: God giving life to Adam; GE taking it from there.

  From General Electric, it would have been a short stroll around Commerce Circle to Westinghouse, so it seems probable that Einstein would want to get a peek at the time capsule. The seven-foot-long, torpedo-shaped tube was made of copper alloy and was designed to last five thousand years. Inside, the capsule contained more than ten million words and over a thousand photos on eleven hundred feet of microfilm, plus a fifteen-minute newsreel featuring a speech by President Roosevelt, Jesse Owens winning the hundred-meter finals at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, and, of course, a preview of the World’s Fair with images of Mayor La Guardia and Grover Whalen.

  There were also, owing to its source, a Westinghouse Mazda lamp, a Westinghouse electric razor and alarm clock, and several other items bearing the company’s logo. Copies of Life magazine, the Bible, a woman’s fashionable hat, a toothbrush, and other assorted ephemera rounded out the collection, all of it crammed into an “Immortal Well” buried fifty feet belowground but visible through a glass window (to prevent anyone from spitting down on it, one critic noted).

  Grover Whalen had left a simple message beginning with, “We were thinking of you3 in the World of Tomorrow …” Thomas Mann was a bit more dour, warning, “Among you, too, the spirit will fare badly—it should never fare too well on this earth, otherwise men would need it no longer.”

  But Einstein, as usual, had taken it seriously. “People living in different countries4 kill each other at irregular time intervals, so that also for this reason anyone who thinks about the future must live in fear and terror,” he had written the previous summer. (The time capsule was buried on September 23, 1938, during the Fair’s construction.) “This is due to the fact that the intelligence and character of the masses are incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who produce something valuable for the community.

  “I trust that posterity will read these statements with a feeling of proud and justified superiority.”

  He may have been right about the intelligence of the masses, however condescending it sounded. Burying a time capsule for five thousand years was one thing, but in order to ensure that the cylinder would be found in 6939, several hundred copies of “The Book of Record of the Time Capsule,” including instructions on how to find it and open it, were shipped to universities and libraries around the world.

  “I must say that5 the conception of the Time Capsule seems to us somewhat infantile,” said the chief curator of Belgium’s Royal Library. “We have received [the book] with a request to preserve it for five thousand years. That made us smile…. The skies today are full of hostile planes, and nobody can tell what tomorrow will bring.”

  We can imagine, after a certain period of time, Einstein and his party grew hungry. Maja, who professed a fondness for all living creatures, had recently developed into a vegetarian, but she also had one weakness: She loved hot dogs. It would seem a fitting picture to have them picnicking somewhere on Whalen’s manicured lawns, disregarding the PLEASE signs, Einstein kicking off his shoes and sitting barefoot as all of them dug in. For Maja’s sake, her famous brother had decreed hot dogs to be a vegetable.

  Certainly, at some point during his visit, Einstein would have visited the Court of Peace, if only to pay silent homage to the little nook of the Czechoslovakia Pavilion, dwarfed as it was by the USSR Pavilion on one side and Japan on the other. Given that it had not yet been open when he had dedicated Palestine on that fitful day a month earlier, almost certainly the proud defiance of its building’s existence now would have moved something within him.

  Walking along Congress Street, the pavilion of his beloved Belgium to his left, he could look around and see the other nations that, unless things changed radically over the next few years, would be overrun by Hitler one by one. Poland was next, surely. Two days before the Fair opened, Hitler had withdrawn from the German-Polish Non-Aggression Act of 1934. He wanted Danzig and he was going to get it, along with the rest of the country, and soon.

  What, Einstein may have wondered, would the Court of Peace look like in 1940, when and if the World’s Fair opened for a second season?

  He appeared at the Fair several more times in the early summer, once on film with former Czech president Edvard Beneš and others in a documentary titled World Leaders on Peace and Democracy.

  “Much blood will yet have to be spilled,” Einstein warned. The film was shown daily in a small theater in the Science and Education Building.

  On June 21, he returned in person to give yet another speech, along with Rabbi Stephen Wise, at a luncheon for Rho Pi Phi, an international fraternity founded by thirteen Jewish pharmacists who, in the face of anti-Semitism, formed their own nonsectarian group. Held at the symbolically named Café Tel Aviv, the crowning ceremony was the presentation of a trophy to “the World’s Fairest Nurse.”

  In July, he turned up again at the Palestine Pavil
ion, this time unofficially. Perhaps the brief minutes before Whalen’s formal lunch had not been enough for Einstein to appreciate the lush landscaping and the reflecting pool. Perhaps something else had brought him back. A pavilion worker reported watching “a gray-haired fairgoer6 who stood for almost an hour in front of the Haifa Diorama.” He recognized Einstein but left the scientist in quiet bemusement, “trying to figure out how the designer rigged things so that a complete change of scene is effected, as if by magic.”

  To many of his colleagues, the Hungarian physicist Leó Szilárd7 was more than an enigma. If anything, he was closer in spirit to what Einstein might have become, if Einstein had not been ambitious. An outspoken and eccentric genius, Szilárd was widely regarded as a brilliant inventor, the quintessential mad scientist who rarely pursued his ideas to completion. When a new line of thinking entered his brain, he simply abandoned his current project and forged ahead with new ideas, often leaving others to claim credit for his inventions.

  Working as a physics instructor in Berlin in the 1920s and 1930s, Szilárd had conceived plans8 for the linear accelerator and the electron microscope, both of which were later put into practical use without any formal credit given to Szilárd. In 1939, American physicist Ernest Lawrence was awarded the Nobel Prize for essentially improving upon Szilárd’s early conception for what would become the cyclotron, a type of particle accelerator, and its application.

  “Had he pushed through9 to success all his new inventions,” said Dennis Gabor, one of Szilárd’s early friends, “we would now talk of him as the Edison of the twentieth century.”

  Leó Szilárd also had the dubious distinction of being a coinventor, along with its namesake, of the Einstein Refrigerator—one of the few concepts for which a patent was actually filed, in 1930. It was at its root designed to be a machine without moving parts, and while their collaboration had lasted seven years, the product never reached consumers (although they did sell a couple of its innovations to Electrolux). The contraption was noisy, for one thing, and it used an awful lot of electricity. But the development of Freon and compressor refrigerators (with their sleek, aerodynamic, and, yes, streamlined design) effectively killed any chance of future riches to be made.

  (Ironically, as it was to turn out, one other of their refrigeration-related inventions, the Einstein-Szilárd Pump, did eventually find a practical use: cooling nuclear reactors.)

  Like Einstein, Leó Szilárd had fled Berlin10 and the Nazis, eventually accepting a position as a researcher at Columbia University in New York City. Unlike Einstein, he not only believed that atomic bombs were possible, he lived in constant mortal fear that Nazi Germany would develop them first. Szilárd was appalled by the lack of interest shown by the United States, especially after it was discovered that Germany had halted the sale of uranium ore from occupied Czechoslovakia.

  In December 1938, a team of German chemists discovered nuclear fission, and Szilárd’s worst fears set in. He suspected that the Germans would next go after uranium from the Belgian Congo, and if they got hold of enough of it, they could win what he now considered to be a race to develop atomic weapons. (Uranium was the key element needed to set off a nuclear chain reaction.) Szilárd talked it over with his close friend and fellow Hungarian Eugene Wigner, also a physicist, who happened to be working at Princeton. Wigner shared his concerns.

  “Both Wigner and I11 began to worry about what would happen if the Germans got hold of some of the vast quantities of uranium which the Belgians had in the Congo,” Szilárd would later explain.

  What he didn’t know was what to do about it. Part of the problem was Szilárd himself: His reputation as an eccentric preceded him, and he knew that if his concerns were to carry any weight at all, he needed a name attached to them.

  “So we began to think, through what channels we could approach the Belgian government and warn them against selling any uranium to Germany,” he said. “It occurred to me that Einstein knew the Queen of the Belgians.” He was referring to Queen Elisabeth, whom Einstein had visited in his last months in Europe and with whom he often kept in touch by mail.

  “And I suggested to Wigner,” Szilárd wrote, “that we visit Einstein, tell him about the situation, and ask him whether he might not write to the Queen.”

  It began as simply as that. Einstein, in between his trips to the World’s Fair, spent his days sailing on Long Island Sound in the little sailboat he had playfully named Tinef, Yiddish for “old piece of junk.” It really wasn’t much more than that. In 1933, to replace the one the Germans had confiscated, he paid $150 for the slightly decrepit, fourteen-foot boat, then promptly sawed off half the centerboard—a pivoting plank of wood that kept the craft from blowing sideways in a harsh wind.

  “I sawed [it]12 so that I could sail in the shallow lake here in Princeton,” he explained to a friend.

  (According to Jack Moffly, commodore of the Princeton Yacht Club while Einstein was in attendance, the university dissuaded him from sailing alone for fear that he would drown—Einstein steadfastly refused to carry a life jacket.) Unfortunately, in the deeper waters of the Long Island Sound, the abbreviated centerboard sometimes left him stranded for hours, unable to tack against a headwind. Elsa would often have to keep dinner warm for hours while her husband drifted blissfully, deep in thought, until nature provided a breeze to carry him home again.

  “We knew that Einstein13 was somewhere on Long Island but we didn’t know precisely where,” Szilárd recalled. They called his office in Princeton and were told he had rented a house on Nassau Point, in a little town called Peconic. It was near the larger village of Southold, and the owner’s name was Dr. Moore. Wigner, unlike Szilárd, knew how to drive, and what’s more he owned a car, a blue Dodge coupé that sported a perfectly flat windshield and was rather cramped inside for a vehicle of its size.

  On Sunday, July 16, Szilárd and Wigner set off for the long journey out to the northern fork of Long Island. Driving from the city, the pair would have likely taken the Grand Central Parkway, where they would have passed the tall spire and bulging globe of the Trylon and Perisphere as they exited Queens and entered Nassau County. Like true, eccentric scientists, however, they promptly got themselves lost.

  “We drove around for about half an hour,” Szilárd said. “We asked a number of people, but no one knew where Dr. Moore’s cabin was.”

  The houses all looked identical, gray-shingled and weather-beaten, and none bore any signs with the name of Moore. They were just about ready to give up and head back to the city when Szilárd spotted a young boy standing at a curb. Why not? he figured.

  “Say, do you by any chance know where Professor Einstein lives?” Szilárd asked, leaning out of the window like a fan seeking an autograph.

  The boy responded, Of course, everyone knew the house, although he had no idea who this Dr. Moore was. He climbed in the backseat and directed them through town to Old Grove Road, where he pointed out a small cottage at the end of the block. They were in luck; Einstein had just come in from a pleasant sail and was sitting on the front porch, chatting with a man named David Rothman.

  The owner of a department store in town, Rothman had met Einstein when the scientist came into his store looking for a pair of “sundials.” Einstein pointed to his feet, where his old pair of sandals were practically worn to shreds. The two became fast friends when Rothman revealed that he, too, played the violin. In the evening, they made music and discussed relativity, even though Rothman had only a grade-school education, or maybe because of it.

  Einstein, surprised at the sight of his former student and colleague Szilárd, together with Wigner, stood and greeted them in his usual sailing attire: a dirty T-shirt and baggy pants tied at the waist with a string of rope. Rothman politely excused himself as Einstein invited his guests to come and join him on the screened-in porch. He asked Maja to make some tea.

  As the trio sat and drank, conversing in their more familiar German, Szilárd began to explain, as Einstein remembered,
“a specific system he devised, and which he thought would make it possible to set up a chain reaction.”

  “I never thought of that!” Einstein responded.*

  He made Szilárd explain it again. Einstein was skeptical until the point was made that nuclear fission had been discovered not here, in America, but at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Germany. Whether or not Einstein believed that atomic weapons might become a reality, he no doubt agreed with Szilárd that the Nazis could not be allowed to develop them first. And while he may initially have been hesitant about getting involved, his recent dedication of the Palestine Pavilion had forcibly thrust him out of the comfortable isolation of Princeton and into the World of Tomorrow, capitalized or not. Now, it seemed, there was no turning back. The future had just appeared on his doorstep.

  They discussed what their next step should be. Szilárd mentioned Belgium and Einstein’s relationship with the queen, but the idea was quickly discarded since all of them were technically foreigners and Einstein himself was not yet an American citizen. This was a matter for the State Department, they decided.

  “Wigner suggested14 that we draft a letter to the Belgian government,” Szilárd explained, “send a copy to the State Department, and give [them] two weeks in which to object.”

  Einstein, they all agreed, should write the letter, as he was the only one famous enough to ensure that it wouldn’t be ignored. Einstein dictated a draft in German, and Wigner translated it. Without fully realizing what they had begun, Szilárd and Wigner got back in the Dodge and drove home to Columbia.