The Practical Einstein: Experiments, Patents, Inventions

Preface

Preface The scope of the experiments, opinions for patent cases, and inventions in which Albert Einstein participated shows how multifarious his activities were, how deeply he was involved in searching for various technological solutions, and how wide his knowledge of physics was outside the fields for which he has been so famous. I am not a pioneer in exploring this topic; the first book dedicated to Einstein ’s practical ideas is Frenkel and Yavelov’s account. Wolfgang Graff’s dissertation concentrates on Einstein’s inventions made before Einstein emigrated to the United States. Graff is the ideal historian to discuss Einstein and Leó Szilárd’s refrigerators, as he is a specialist in cooling technology. Michael Eckert presents a broad picture of aeronautics around the First World War, and Jobst Broelmann does the same for the development of the gyrocompass, two other fields in which Einstein tested his mettle. Dieter Lohmeier and Bernhardt Schell analyze Einstein’s contribution to the gyro compass by publishing and annotating his correspondence with Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe and colleagues. Finally, Matthew Trainer published a concise report on Einstein ’s selected inventions. My primary source of information in researching the book was the Albert Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. This archive, as with archives in general, can be searched for names of correspondents and dates, but rarely for the content of the documents. This entails no problem when the persons who collaborated with Einstein in technical matters are widely known, such as Leó Szilárd, Gustav Bucky, or Rudolf Goldschmidt. When, however, Einstein proposes an experiment or is approached for an opinion, sometimes in letters exchanged with friends or family members, only a systematic reading of the documents will reveal the contents. Such reading has already been done for the period 1879–1922, and the results published in the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein. These volumes are the reason for the abundance of information x Preface from this early period, not only in the present book but also in the Einstein biographies published in the past decades. Here and there lie hints at opinions, experiments, and inventive ideas that are not discussed in detail. As examples, Fritz Haber, Einstein’s close acquaintance and colleague, encouraged I. Rosenberg, member of the board of the Allgemeine Gesellschaft für Chemische Industrie, to seek Einstein’s expert opinion on a revocatory action of Konrad Kubierschky on optical and physicochemical phenomena. Einstein was ready to contribute and prepared his opinion before June 19, 1919, but the opinion is not available. Kubierschky owned patents on distillation towers, absorption cooling, heating, and other inventions in the first decades of the twentieth century, but none of these provides useful information on Einstein’s role. A brief sentence in a letter of Hermann Anschütz-Kaempfe to Einstein notes that Einstein had proposed using two gyroscopes rotating in opposite directions for an artificial horizon for aircraft and ship. Again, no details are known. Another sentence in a letter to Elsa Einstein talks about an experiment , proposed by Einstein and to be performed by Pieter Zeeman. And a comment in another letter envisages an experiment at the University of Kiel, with Walther Kossel. Time and again, secondary literature asserts that Einstein, together with a painter and a dentist, participated in the development of an apparatus for copying artistic drawings. Whether it is true, and whether the painter was Emil Orlik and the dentist Josef Grünberg, are questions whose answers may still be buried in the abyss of the Einstein Archives. But in the infrequent letters they exchanged, there is no mention of such an invention. The most serious limitation in writing this book, however, has been that I am not an engineer in any field Einstein was active in. I therefore welcome any critical comments, suggestions, or discoveries of new documents. Please send them to me at illy@einstein.caltech.edu. English translations of many of the quotations in the book are from the volumes of translations accompanying the documentary edition of the Collected Papers of Albert Einstein and also from Einstein, Anschütz and the Kiel Gyro Compass and The Born-Einstein Letters 1916–1955. I thank Trevor Lipscombe, former editor in chief of the Johns Hopkins University Press, for proposing the topic and for his erudite stylistic corrections . It was also a pleasure to work with Greg Nicholl, assistant acquisitions editor, and with Michele Callaghan. I deeply appreciate the work of copy [3.14.70.203] Project MUSE...