Gary Berger was working as a consultant surgeon in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, when he first began what became his lifelong fascination with the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Albert Einstein.
“I had heard about the theory of relativity, but didn’t really know what it was, and wanted to educate myself,” he says.
Initially — and this was 20 years ago — he started to collect photographs of Einstein: “I just wanted to get an idea of who Einstein was.” Then, with the encouragement of Michael DiRuggiero, owner of the Manhattan Rare Book Company in New York, Berger began acquiring documents relating to Einstein’s scientific life.
Eventually the collection swelled to near unmanageable proportions. Berger, realising he needed help in organising what he had bought, invited DiRuggerio to North Carolina. The two men spent days sorting through the Einstein material. It ultimately grew to what is believed to be the biggest collection of Einstein imagery in private hands.
Berger then decided he wanted others to enjoy the “Einsteiniana” — and so around four years ago he and DiRuggerio started work on a magnificent book.
Gary Berger MD
Gary Berger
It’s a justly hefty volume of 51 portrait photographs of Einstein, many signed and dated by the man himself, entitled Einstein: The Man and His Mind, with publication timed to coincide with the centenary of Einstein’s receipt of the Nobel Prize. The book also includes images of some of the original formulas and papers that rightly led to Einstein being regarded as the best-known scientist in the world.
The book is a treasure chest of unexpected Einstein facts. Here are 12 things we learn from it:
1. The very first image is an Einstein unfamiliar to most people: it’s the teenage Albert, aged just 17, and is thought to have been taken in 1896 to mark his graduation from school in Aarau, Switzerland.
He signed it and gave it to his close friend, another Albert, Albert Karr-Karusi. Berger and DiRuggiero liken the photograph handover to high-school students signing their yearbook.
Though we are not used to seeing Einstein as a teenager, his trademark shock of hair — sticking straight up as though he had been plugged into the mains — is clear to see.
2. Between 1910 and 1922, Albert Einstein was nominated 62 times for the Nobel Prize by his colleagues.
His win was finally announced on 9 November 1922 “for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect.”
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Photograph by Yousuf Karsh 1948
He wasn’t able to travel to Stockholm to receive his prize in 1922, only making his acceptance speech in July 1923.
3. Albert was a bit of a fashion maverick. There are photographs in the book of him quite plainly not wearing socks, which he apparently regarded as a waste of time, and didn’t even bother wearing them for a meeting with US President Roosevelt, or for his naturalisation ceremony to become an American citizen.
But though he was often pictured in what looks like a disreputable sweater, marked with tiny burns from his ever-present pipe, his favourite garment was his even more beaten-up leather jacket. He bought it on his arrival in America in 1933 and is said to have loved the jacket because it “made him feel more American”.
4. In fact, the brown leather bomber jacket was made by jeans specialists Levi Strauss. In a lovely coda, Albert Einstein’s “Cossack” jacket went up for auction in 2016 — and was bought, by Levi’s, for $146,744.
They put it in their own museum, but have since produced limited versions of the Einstein bomber for present-day wearers. The auctioneer said at the time that the jacket still seemed to give off little puffs of Einstein’s pipe smoke.
5. The book contains pictures by some of the best-known photographers of the day, some of whose names still resonate.
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Image taken by an unknown photographer in 1938
A 1938 photo of Einstein in that jacket (which he appears to have lived in in lieu of a coat) was taken by Lottie Jacobi, said to be one of Albert’s favourite snappers. But Berger and DiRuggiero say that photographers were practically falling over themselves to take pictures of the scientist, frequently succeeding in getting him to sign the photographs as authentication.
He often gave signed pictures of himself to friends, but Berger and DiRuggiero tell us that in return he sometimes received gifts vastly outweighing the pictures in value. For example, in 1928, to mark the 50th birthday of his good friend and personal physician Janos Plesch, Einstein had a portrait photograph taken at a studio in Berlin and presented it to Plesch, signed and dated.
Four months later, the authors say, Plesch came up with a stunning present for Einstein’s 50th birthday: he “arranged for the city of Berlin to grant Einstein, its most famous citizen, 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.”
Of course, Einstein wasn’t able to enjoy this extraordinary bounty for long, since everything, including the boat, was ultimately confiscated by the Nazis. Just the same…
6. That Boat: Albert obviously missed it. He and his wife Elsa settled in America in 1933, after being welcomed by Princeton University to take up a role, free of teaching responsibilities, at its Institute for Advanced Study.
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A letter from Einstein in 1940
He remained there for the rest of his life until his death in 1955, but would spend holidays on Rhode Island. He bought himself a second boat, named it Tinef — Yiddish for “a piece of junk”, and liked nothing better than aimlessly pootling about on the water, occasionally having to be rescued by members of the local yacht club.
7. One of Berger and DiRuggiero’s favourite pictures is a 1937 portrait of Einstein, deeply suntanned and clutching his inevitable pipe, looking like a film star. It was taken by Lottie Jacobi in Huntingdon, Long Island.
She, like the scientist himself, and numbers of other photographers who took his picture, was a refugee from the Nazis.
She first took pictures of him at her father’s studio in Berlin in 1927, but when she fled to America in the 1930s she made contact and the two became fast friends.
8. One of the rarest pictures in the book was taken by the British photographer Walter Benington, in June 1921.
Einstein had been invited by Lord Haldane to give a lecture on his theory of relativity, and he did so at King’s College London, during his first visit to Britain. Einstein, say the authors, presented this handsome portrait to a woman called Ruth Blumgart, a close associate of Sigmund Freud.
But she was also the daughter of an American Jewish leader, Judge Julian Mack, whom Einstein contacted when he arrived in America in 1933.
The two men worked closely together to help “victims of Nazism, including many prominent scientists, to escape Germany”, as the Nazis continued to rise to power.
9. It’s already been mentioned that Einstein looked like a film star in some of his pictures. Turns out Albert was a bit of a film fan, too. He particularly liked Charlie Chaplin, specifically asking to meet him at the premiere of Chaplin’s film City Lights on a visit to California, the first of three, in 1931.
Contemporary reports claimed the following exchange: Einstein to Chaplin: “What I most admire about you is your universality. You don’t say a word, yet the whole world understands you!”
Chaplin to Einstein: “True. But your glory is even greater. The whole world admires you, even though they don’t understand a word of what you say.” In any case, the picture chosen by Berger and DiRuggiero shows only Albert, with a camera slung round his neck, presumably in preparation for taking “Me With” pictures of him and Chaplin. We can easily imagine him taking pictures on his cellphone today, or even selfies.
10. Among the big-name photographers queuing up to take Einstein’s picture were a number of German Jewish refugees, such as Trude Fleischmann, husband and wife team Sasha and Cami Stone, trading as Studio Stone, and Gerty Simon.
But we also find portraits taken by the renowned Canadian-Armenian photographer Yousuf Karsh; and, in a gorgeous pull-out of seven pictures, images taken by the Russian-American Roman Vishniac, best known for his stirring and painful photographs of central European Jews before the Holocaust. Vishniac chose to show Einstein teaching his complex theories at Princeton, standing against a blackboard covered in mathematical symbols.
11. It is well-known that Einstein was famously offered the opportunity to become president of Israel, and turned it down.
He was, however, among the founders of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, which today owns the rights to his image, and gave the university’s first scientific lecture in 1923. Einstein bequeathed his personal archives and the rights to his works to the Hebrew University.
At the Einstein archives, on the HU campus, can be found his scientific and non-scientific writings, including his famous E=mc2 formula; and Berger and DiRuggiero have chosen to give proceeds from their book to the archives. Professor Hanoch Gutfreund, academic director of the archives, has written the foreword to the book.
12. Einstein was a multi-layered individual, who once said he would have liked to have been a musician, had he not made his life in science.
But perhaps his most encouraging legacy, even for those who do not immediately grasp his theory of relativity, is his 1929 comment which opens the book: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”
Einstein: The Man and His Mind, by Gary S Berger and Michael DiRuggiero, is published by Damiani Books
