Einstein: His Life and Universe

by Walter Isaacson

  Einstein relished the simplicity of life in Watch Hill. He puttered around its lanes and even shopped for groceries with Mrs. Bucky. Most of all, he loved sailing his seventeen-foot wooden boat Tinef, which is Yiddish for a piece of junk. He usually went out on his own, aimlessly and often carelessly. “Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,” remembered a member of the local yacht club who went to retrieve him on more than one occasion. “He apparently was just out there meditating.”

  As he had at Caputh, Einstein would drift with the breeze and sometimes scribble equations in his notebook when becalmed. “Once we all waited with growing concern for his return from an afternoon sail,” Bucky recalls. “Finally, at 11 pm, we decided to send the Coast Guard out to search for him. The guardsmen found him in the Bay, not in the least concerned about his situation.”

  At one point a friend gave him an expensive outboard motor for emergency use. Einstein declined. He had a childlike delight about taking small risks—he still never took a life jacket even though he could not swim—and escaping to where he could be by himself. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” said Bucky. “To Einstein, this could simply have provided more time to think.”33

  The sailing rescue sagas continued the following summer, when the Einsteins began renting in Old Lyme, Connecticut, also on Long Island Sound. One such tale even made the New York Times. “Relative Tide and Sand Bars Trap Einstein,” read the headline. The young boys who saved him were invited to the house for raspberry juice.34

  Elsa loved the Old Lyme house, although both she and her family found it a bit too imposing. It was set on twenty acres, with a tennis court and swimming pool, and the dining room was so large that they initially were afraid to use it. “Everything is so luxurious here that the first ten days—I swear to you—we ate in the pantry,” Elsa wrote a friend. “The dining room was too magnificent for us.”35

  When the summers were over, the Einsteins would visit the Bucky family at their Manhattan home once or twice a month. Einstein would also stay, especially when he was by himself, at the home of the widower Leon Watters, the pharmaceutical company owner he had met in Pasadena. He once surprised Watters by arriving without a dressing gown or pajamas. “When I retire, I sleep as nature made me,” he said. Watters recalled that he did, however, ask to borrow a pencil and notepad for his bedside.

  Out of both politeness and his touch of vanity, Einstein found it hard to decline requests from artists and photographers who wanted him to pose. One weekend in April 1935, when he was staying with Watters, Einstein sat for two artists in one day. His first session was with the wife of Rabbi Stephen Wise, not known for her artistic ability. Why was he doing it? “Because she’s a nice woman,” he answered.

  Later that day, Watters picked Einstein up to ferry him to Greenwich Village for a session with the Russian sculptor Sergei Konenkov, a practitioner of Soviet realism, who was producing what would be a distinguished bust of Einstein that is now at the Institute for Advanced Study. Einstein had been introduced to Konenkov through Margot, who was also a sculptor. Soon, all of them became friends with his wife, Margarita Konenkova, who, unbeknown to Einstein, was a Soviet spy. In fact, Einstein would later become, after Elsa’s death, romantically involved with her, which would end up creating, as we shall see, more complexities than he ever knew.36

  Now that they had decided to stay in the United States, it made sense for Einstein to seek citizenship. When Einstein visited the White House, President Roosevelt had suggested that he should accept the offer of some congressmen to have a special bill passed on his behalf, but Einstein instead decided to go through the normal procedures. That meant leaving the country, so that he—and Elsa, Margot, and Helen Dukas—could come in not as visitors but as people seeking citizenship.

  So in May 1935 they all sailed on the Queen Mary to Bermuda for a few days to satisfy these formalities. The royal governor was there to greet them when they arrived in Hamilton, and he recommended the island’s two best hotels. Einstein found them stuffy and pretentious. As they walked through town, he saw a modest guest cottage, and that is where they ended up.

  Einstein declined all official invitations from the Bermuda gentry and socialized instead with a German cook he met at a restaurant, who invited him to come sailing on his little boat. They were away for seven hours, and Elsa feared that Nazi agents may have nabbed her husband. But she found him at the cook’s home, where he had gone to enjoy a dinner of German dishes.37

  That summer, a house down the block from the one they were renting in Princeton went on sale. A modest white clapboard structure that peeked through a little front yard onto one of the town’s pleasant tree-lined arteries, 112 Mercer Street was destined to become a world-famous landmark not because of its grandeur but because it so perfectly suited and symbolized the man who lived there. Like the public persona that he adopted in later life, the house was unassuming, sweet, charming, and unpretentious. It sat there right on a main street, highly visible yet slightly cloaked behind a veranda.

  Its modest living room was a bit overwhelmed by Elsa’s heavy German furniture, which had somehow caught up with them after all their wanderings. Helen Dukas commandeered the small library on the first floor as a workroom in which she dealt with Einstein’s correspondence and took charge of the only telephone in the house (Princeton 1606 was the unlisted number).

  Elsa oversaw the construction of a second-floor office for Einstein. They removed part of the back wall and installed a picture window that looked out on the long and lush backyard garden. Bookcases on both sides went up to the ceiling. A large wooden table, cluttered with papers and pipes and pencils, sat in the center with a view out of the window, and there was an easy chair where Einstein would sit for hours scribbling on a pad of paper in his lap.

  The usual pictures of Faraday and Maxwell were tacked on the walls. There was also, of course, one of Newton, although after a while it fell off its hook. To that mix was added a fourth: Mahatma Gandhi, Einstein’s new hero now that his passions were as much political as they were scientific. As a small joke, the only award displayed was a framed certificate of Einstein’s membership in the Bern Scientific Society.

  Besides his menagerie of women, the household was joined, over the years, by various pets. There was a parrot named Bibo, who required an unjustifiable amount of medical care; a cat named Tiger; and a white terrier named Chico that had belonged to the Bucky family. Chico was an occasional problem. “The dog is very smart,” Einstein explained. “He feels sorry for me because I receive so much mail. That’s why he tries to bite the mailman.”38

  “The professor does not drive,” Elsa often said. “It’s too complicated for him.” Instead, he loved to walk, or, more precisely, shuffle, up Mercer Street each morning to his office at the Institute. People often snapped their heads when he passed, but the sight of him walking lost in thought was soon one of the well-known attractions of the town.

  On his walk back home at midday, he would often be joined by three or four professors or students. Einstein would usually walk calmly and quietly, as if in a reverie, while they pranced around him, waved their arms, and tried to make their points. When they got to the house, the others would peel off, but Einstein sometimes just stood there thinking. Every now and then, unwittingly, he even started drifting back to the Institute. Dukas, always watching from her window, would come outside, take his arm, and lead him inside for his macaroni lunch. Then he would nap, dictate some answers to his mail, and pad up to his study for another hour or two of rumination about potential unified field theories.39

  Occasionally, he would take rambling walks on his own, which could be dicey. One day someone called the Institute and asked to speak to a particular dean. When his secretary said that the dean wasn’t available, the caller hesitantly asked for Einstein’s home address. That was not possible to give out, he was informed. The caller’s voice then dropped to a whisper. “Please don’t tell an
ybody,” he said, “but I am Dr. Einstein, I’m on my way home, and I’ve forgotten where my house is.”40

  This incident was recounted by the son of the dean, but like many of the tales about Einstein’s distracted behavior it may have been exaggerated. The absentminded professor image fit him so nicely and naturally that it became reinforcing. It was a role that Einstein was happy to play in public and that his neighbors relished recounting. And like most assumed roles, there was a core of truth to it.

  At one dinner where Einstein was being honored, for example, he got so distracted that he pulled out his notepad and began scribbling equations. When he was introduced, the crowd burst into a standing ovation, but he was still lost in thought. Dukas caught his attention and told him to get up. He did, but noticing the crowd standing and applauding, he assumed it was for someone else and heartily joined in. Dukas had to come over and inform him that the ovation was for him.41

  In addition to the tales of the dreamy Einstein, another common theme was that of the kindly Einstein helping a child, usually a little girl, with her homework. The most famous of these involved an 8-year-old neighbor on Mercer Street, Adelaide Delong, who rang his bell and asked for help with a math problem. She carried a plate of homemade fudge as a bribe. “Come in,” he said. “I’m sure we can solve it.” He helped explain the math to her, but made her do her own homework. In return for the fudge, he gave her a cookie.

  After that the girl kept reappearing. When her parents found out, they apologized profusely. Einstein waved them off. “That’s quite unnecessary,” he said. “I’m learning just as much from your child as she is learning from me.” He loved to tell, with a twinkle in his eye, the tale of her visits. “She was a very naughty girl,” he would laugh. “Do you know she tried to bribe me with candy?”

  A friend of Adelaide’s recalled going with her and another girl on one of these visits to Mercer Street. When they got up to his study, Einstein offered them lunch, and they accepted. “So he moved a whole bunch of papers from the table, opened four cans of beans with a can opener, and heated them on a Sterno stove one by one, stuck a spoon in each and that was our lunch,” she recalled. “He didn’t give us anything to drink.”42

  Later, Einstein famously told another girl who complained about her problems with math, “Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics; I can assure you that mine are even greater.” But lest it be thought he helped only girls, he hosted a group of senior boys from the Princeton Country Day School who were baffled by a problem on their math final exam.43

  He also helped a 15-year-old boy at Princeton High School, Henry Rosso, who was doing poorly in a journalism course. His teacher had offered an A to anyone who scored an interview with Einstein, so Rosso showed up at Mercer Street but was rebuffed at the door. As he was slinking away, the milkman gave him a tip: Einstein could be found walking a certain route every morning at 9:30. So Rosso snuck out of school one day, positioned himself accordingly, and was able to accost Einstein as he wandered by.

  Rosso was so flummoxed that he did not know what to ask, which may have been why he was doing poorly in the course. Einstein took pity on him and suggested questions. No personal topics, he insisted. Ask about math instead. Rosso was smart enough to follow his advice. “I discovered that nature was constructed in a wonderful way, and our task is to find out the mathematical structure of the nature itself,” Einstein explained of his own education at age 15. “It is a kind of faith that helped me through my whole life.”

  The interview earned Rosso an A. But it also caused him a bit of dismay. He had promised Einstein that it would only be used in the school paper, but without his permission it got picked up by the Trenton newspaper and then others around the world, which provided yet another lesson in journalism.44

  Elsa’s Death

  Soon after they moved into 112 Mercer Street, Elsa became afflicted with a swollen eye. Tests in Manhattan showed that it was a symptom of heart and kidney problems, and she was ordered to remain immobile in bed.

  Einstein sometimes read to her, but mostly he threw himself more intently into his studies. “Strenuous intellectual work and looking at God’s nature are the reconciling, fortifying yet relentlessly strict angels that shall lead me through all of life’s troubles,” he had written to the mother of his first girlfriend. Then as now, he could escape the complexity of human emotions by delving into the mathematical elegance that could describe the cosmos. “My husband sticks fearsomely to his calculations,” Elsa wrote Watters. “I have never seen him so engrossed in his work.”45

  Elsa painted a warmer picture of her husband when writing to her friend Antonina Vallentin.“He has been so upset by my illness,” she reported. “He wanders around like a lost soul. I never thought he loved me so much. And that comforts me.”

  Elsa decided that they would be better off if they went away for the summer, as they usually did, and so they rented a cottage on Saranac Lake in the Adirondack Mountains of New York. “I’m certain to get better there,” she said. “If my Ilse walked into my room now, I would recover at once.”46

  It turned out to be an enjoyable summer, but by winter Elsa was again bedridden and getting weaker. She died on December 20, 1936.

  Einstein was hit harder than he might have expected. In fact, he actually cried, as he had done when his mother died. “I had never seen him shed a tear,” Peter Bucky reported, “but he did then as he sighed, ‘Oh, I shall really miss her.’ ”47

  Their relationship had not been a model romance. Before their marriage, Einstein’s letters to her were filled with sweet endearments, but those disappeared over the years. He could be prickly and demanding at times, seemingly inured to her emotional needs, and occasionally a flirt or more with other women.

  Yet beneath the surface of many romances that evolve into partnerships, there is a depth not visible to outside observers. Elsa and Albert Einstein liked each other, understood each other, and perhaps most important (for she, too, was actually quite clever in her own way) were amused by each other. So even if it was not the stuff of poetry, the bond between them was a solid one. It was forged by satisfying each other’s desires and needs, it was genuine, and it worked in both directions.

  Not surprisingly, Einstein found solace in his work. He admitted to Hans Albert that focusing was difficult, but the attempt provided him the means to escape the painfully personal. “As long as I am able to work, I must not and will not complain, because work is the only thing that gives substance to life.”48

  When he came to the office, he was “ashen with grief,” his collaborator Banesh Hoffmann noted, but he insisted on delving into their work each day. He needed it more than ever, he said. “At first his attempts to concentrate were pitiful,” Hoffmann recalled. “But he had known sorrow before and had learned that work was a precious antidote.”49 Together they worked that month on two major papers: one that explored how the bending of light by the gravitational fields of galaxies could create “cosmic lenses” that would magnify distant stars, and another that explored the existence of gravitational waves.50

  Max Born learned of Elsa’s death in a letter from Einstein in which it was mentioned almost as an afterthought in explaining why he had become less social. “I live like a bear in my cave, and really feel more at home than ever before in my eventful life,” he told his old friend. “This bearlike quality has been further enhanced by the death of my woman comrade, who was better with other people than I am.” Born later marveled at “the incidental way” in which Einstein broke the news of his wife’s death. “For all his kindness, sociability and love of humanity,” commented Born, “he was nevertheless totally detached from his environment and the human beings in it.”51

  That was not entirely true. For a self-styled bear in a cave, Einstein attracted a clan wherever he went. Whether it was walking home from the Institute, puttering around 112 Mercer Street, or sharing summer cottages and Manhattan weekends with the Watters or Bucky families, Einstein was rarely alon
e, except when he trundled up to his study. He could keep an ironic detachment and retreat into his own reveries, but he was a true loner only in his own mind.

  After Elsa died, he still lived with Helen Dukas and his stepdaughter Margot, and soon thereafter his sister moved in. Maja had been living near Florence with her husband, Paul Winteler. But when Mussolini enacted laws in 1938 that withdrew resident status from all foreign Jews, Maja moved to Princeton on her own. Einstein, who loved her dearly and liked her immensely, was thrilled.

  Einstein also encouraged Hans Albert, now 33, to come to America, at least for a visit. Their relationship had been rocky, but Einstein had come to admire the diligence of his son’s engineering work, especially regarding the flow of rivers, a topic he had once studied himself.52 He had also changed his mind and encouraged his son to have children, and he was now happy to have two young grandsons.

  In October 1937, Hans Albert arrived for a three-month stay. Einstein met him at the pier, where they posed for photographs, and Hans Albert playfully lit a long Dutch pipe he had brought his father. “My father would like me to come here with my family,” he said. “You know his wife died recently and he is all alone now.”53

  During the visit, young and eager Peter Bucky offered to drive Hans Albert across America so that he could visit universities and seek positions as an engineering professor. The trip, which covered ten thousand miles, took them to Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, Iowa City, Knoxville, Vicksburg, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, and Indianapolis.54 Einstein reported to Mileva Mari how much he had enjoyed being with their son. “He has such a great personality,” he wrote. “It is unfortunate that he has this wife, but what can you do if he’s happy?”55

  Einstein had written Frieda a few months earlier and suggested that she not accompany her husband on the trip.56 But with his affection for Hans Albert fully restored, Einstein urged both of them to return together the following year, with their two children, and stay in America. They did. Hans Albert found a job studying soil conservation at a U.S. Department of Agriculture extension station in Clemson, South Carolina, where he became an authority on alluvial transport by rivers. Displaying his father’s taste, he built a simple wooden house, reminiscent of that in Caputh, in nearby Greenville, where he applied for American citizenship in December 1938.57