Einstein’s Love Letters Offered A Rare Glimpse Into His Personal World, And They’re About To Be Auctioned Off
We all know Albert Einstein as a scientific genius behind some of the greatest mysteries of the universe, but his love life might be the most fascinating part about him yet. He wrote love letters to his first wife that offered a rare glimpse into his personal world.
These letters just hit the auction block at Christie’s. A total of 169 items will be auctioned off, including a collection of early alchemical texts from 1400 C.E. Italy, a 15th-century copy of Virgil’s Aeneid once owned by British Prime Minister William Gladstone, and classical scores autographed by composers like Beethoven.
But the most intriguing texts have to be the ones from Albert Einstein. They have been dubbed “The Einstein Love Letters,” and they make up about half of the information that experts know about the famous physicist’s early life.
Between 1898 and 1903, an estimated 147 pages that make up 43 individual correspondences were mailed to Mileva Marić, Einstein’s first wife.
During this time, Einstein was tenured at the Federal Patent Office in Bern, Austria, which is where he started working on what would become the Special Theory of Relativity. He even mentioned some of his thoughts about the concept in his letters to Marić.
“I am more and more convinced that the electrodynamics of moving bodies, as presented today, is not correct and that it should be possible to present it in a simpler way,” he wrote in August 1899.
According to a statement from Christie’s, Einstein and Marić got married on January 6, 1903. They ended up having three children together. Not much is known about their first child, Lieserl, who was born in 1902, before the couple’s marriage.
The letters include some of the only details of their daughter. They indicate that she contracted scarlet fever. Lieserl likely died shortly after Einstein’s final letter was sent. Later, they had two sons.
It is believed that Marić became pregnant during a stay at Lake Como, but Einstein’s family tried to keep them apart.
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After their daughter was born, he sent letters asking, “What kind of little eyes does she have? Whom of us two does she resemble more?”
Marić was also an accomplished mathematician and physicist. She first met Einstein in their six-person university cohort at Zurich Polytechnic, where she was the only woman.
Some experts argue that Marić should receive credit for helping Einstein develop the theories he presented in his first four papers, which are also included in the auction lot.
The couple’s marriage lasted until 1919 when Einstein and Marić officially divorced. Einstein agreed to give Marić any award money he might receive one day from a Nobel Prize. Two years later, in 1921, he won the Nobel Prize in physics.
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