Well, if he hadn't died on a Monday, I probably wouldn't bother with this. But he did, and it's again a Monday so here it is, from the penultimate chapter of Einstein: His Life and Universe, by Walter Isaacson, published in 2007. Albert died at Princeton Hospital, yep, in good old New Jersey. We zoom into his hospital room late on Sunday night:
He worked as long as he could, and when the pain got too great, he went to sleep. Shortly after one a.m. on Monday, April 18, 1955, the nurse heard him blurt out a few words in German that she could not understand. The aneurysm, like a big blister, had burst, and Einstein died at age 76.
I can't highly recommend Isaacson's book, except for the factual information it contains. You can get an idea of the problem from the quote above. Definitely skip the first chapter, read the second chapter, and then just for fun, read the last chapter, "Einstein's Brain and Einstein's Mind," about the removal of Einstein's brain without permission of his relatives by Thomas Harvey, the pathologist on duty lo those many years ago. Fifty six, to be exact.
Also, which I didn't know before reading the footnote about it in Isaacson's book, Einstein's eyes were removed by (or given to) his ophthalmologist, Henry Abrams: "...Abrams happened to wander into the autopsy room, and he ended up taking with him his former patient's eyeballs, which he subsequently kept in a New Jersey safe deposit box." I would surely like to know what then happened to those soulful looking eyes, but mainly it's not pleasant to think they were even removed. Unlike Einstein's extracted brain, which has a bizarre and much-written-about history (see the book Driving Mr. Albert, for instance), his eyes receive no further mention that I have yet found in the historical record (okay, what I mean is, I just now did a search and didn't see anything relevant). Albert's body was cremated as he'd requested and, according to Isaacson, his ashes were scattered in the Delaware River.
The oddest thing of all I learned from reading the last chapter of Isaacson's book is that Einstein may have a still-living daughter. Einstein was 57 in 1936 when his second wife Elsa died. He never remarried, but as Isaacson says, "was spending time with a variety of women." (Uh, well, yeh, he did that also when he was married to Elsa, but not as much maybe.) Sometime in the early 1940s, Einstein's oldest son, Hans Albert, a hydraulics engineering professor at Berkeley, adopted a baby girl, who then of course became the step-granddaughter of Albert, an addition to the several actual, bloodline grandchildren, some of whom I guess are still around. The question of that moment of adoption, 1941, would be, why the heck would H.A. and wife adopt another kid, especially one born in Chicago? Hmmm. Anyway, the adopted one's name is Evelyn Einstein. (How many Evelyn's have you known? Not many I bet--there's another mystery: the choice of her name.) In 1998, she was "divorced, marginally employed, and struggling with poverty," Isaacson says. Whether that's changed, I don't know.
Well, just now googling her name, I find she just died at age 70! Whew, how bizarre is that? The obituary being in today's New York Times online! (I wrote this part and the remainder on the 19th of April, actually.) Anyway, Evelyn could not have a DNA test done to determine Einstein's paternity or lack of it, Isaacson says, because the way Thomas Harvey embalmed Einstein's brain "made it impossible to extract usable DNA."
The oddness of this very likely possibility of Einstein having had a post-marital daughter is only made stranger by the fact that he and his first wife, before they were married, had a daughter who was given up for adoption or left with her mother's relatives in Serbia. Quoting Isaacson from the list of "main characters" in his book: "Lieserl Einstein (1902-?). Premarital daughter of Einstein and Mileva Maric. Einstein probably never saw her. Likely left in her Serbian mother's hometown of Novi Sad for adoption and may have died of scarlet fever in late 1903."
Albert and Mileva, once they were married, had two sons. Besides Hans Albert (1904-1973) there was, again quoting Isaacson: "Eduard Einstein (1910-1965). Second son of Mileva Maric and Einstein. Smart and artistic, he obsessed about Freud and hoped to become a psychiatrist, but he succumbed to his own schizophrenic demons in his twenties and was institutionalized in Switzerland for much of the rest of his life." Eduard, whose nickname was Tete, never married or had any kids.
(I would say "schizophrenia demons" instead of "schizophrenic demons." Could be a typo in the book. Have you noticed typos are more common these days, appearing in even the best of publications? What's up with that?)
Evelyn does, in the 1960 photo in the NYTimes obit, seem to have Einstein's eyes.
Evelyn does, in the 1960 photo in the NYTimes obit, seem to have Einstein's eyes.
