Einstein wasn't worth the money.
In a scribbled copy of a telegram sent in spring 1927, Johns
Hopkins President Frank J. Goodnow posed the possibility of
recruiting Albert Einstein to teach physics.
"Shall [Johns Hopkins] offer 5 thousand for semester. Answer,"
Goodnow sent after meeting Einstein in Berlin.
"Goodnow," came the reply from Hopkins provost and former physics
professor Joseph S. Ames. "Do not think Einstein for one year
worth $10,000. Money needed elsewhere badly."
Einstein had won the Nobel Prize six years before. His theory of
relativity and other scientific principles had revolutionized
Newton-born classical physics, making way for the modern field of
quantum mechanics. Einstein was already an international star,
given a hero's welcome at New York's harbor in 1921, and lauded
with medals and honorary degrees from Columbia, Princeton, and
other elite universities.
But, as told in letters filed in an acidfree folder in the
archives at Milton S. Eisenhower Library, a move to lure Einstein
to Hopkins failed. It seems the university also was making a play
for renowned physicist Erwin Schrodinger, a founder of the new
study of "wave behavior."
Schrodinger got the initial offer. And--after writing to ask
about tenure, pension, teaching workload, and vacation days--he
apparently didn't take the job. Goodnow then made a formal pitch
to Einstein, who had become a target of Nazi-led
anti-Semitism.
"I find in talking over with my friends that they were, as I
supposed, very anxious to have you with us," Goodnow wrote on
July 12, 1927.
The reply came back Sept. 7, typed in German in heavy round
letters and signed simply "A. Einstein." The physics professor
wrote that health problems prevented him from accepting. He
further explained in words that would haunt Ames: "I could not
offer enough to justify, it seems to me, such a great financial
offer."
"Dear Goodnow," Ames wrote bluntly a few weeks later, forwarding
Einstein's reply to the president at his farm in Norfolk,
Connecticut. "He thinks that you offered him too much money."
In the 1920s, these letters were filed away in the administrative
folders of the Office of the President, along with other
work-a-day exchanges. The yellowed copies, bearing the finger
smudges of Einstein, Goodnow, or Ames, lay hidden among memos
about the physics lab construction budget.
From his subterranean office on the A-Level at Homewood's
Eisenhower Library, archivist Jim Stimpert mentions the letters
as an example of the tales archives can tell. Discovered decades
afterward, the modest moment is regarded as a curiosity by the
few fellow researchers who know of it.
"To think, Einstein didn't think he was worth that much money. He
thought it would be wasteful," ponders Stimpert. "It might be
akin to a star baseball player turning down a million dollar
contract."
The university's offer in today's dollars wasn't small change
either: about $90,000 a year.
The intimacy of the letters--the polite language, the
deteriorating paper, and slanted handwriting--enlivens history.
Yet, should Hopkins today woo another later-to-be-iconic
scientist, the exchange might be lost. Put in 1990s terms, would
the university have filed Einstein's response if it had been made
via electronic mail?
"Theoretically, people shouldn't be deleting e-mail until I read
it," Stimpert says of the growing prevalence of computerized
dialogue among campus faculty and staff. "But I'm not going to
read everyone's e-mail. And even if I wanted to, people don't
want their e-mail read."
The Einstein-related letters (a slim folder compared to the 90
boxes of material at Princeton University, where Einstein became
affiliated in 1933) are found in Hopkins's Special Collections
and Archives. The historic moment they portray is among thousands
hidden in university materials housed at Homewood. The Peabody
Institute and Applied Physics Laboratory mark their histories in
separate collections. And the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions
maintain the Alan M. Chesney Medical Archives.
Scientists' notebooks full of scrawled theories, copies of
speeches, letters, memos, diaries, unpublished manuscripts,
photos, lawsuits, minutes, party invitations, budgets, student
essays, patent requests, newspaper articles, scrapbooks, and
other fallout from the daily business of being a university are
constantly categorized, boxed, and stored.
Those who come searching include biographers, historians,
students, and administrators. They sit at long tables, a can of
pencils within reach, to visit and analyze the past. But
modernity has come calling too, and the electronic era,
especially, is knocking the dust off the archives.
Much of what's stored on steel shelving now can be glimpsed via
the Internet by researchers from Charles Village to Shanghai.
Stimpert and other record keepers welcome the wider access but
also wonder, more and more, if pieces of history will be
squandered as the information age accelerates. Archives today are
adapting. Some call it evolution. Some call it revolution.
Einstein himself might wonder at the cacophony.
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