9:53 p.m. - 2008-03-02
Albert Einstein's life, scientific thought, and Influence.
"How Albert Einstein (1879-1955) Changed the Way We See the Universe," by Franklin and Betty J. Parker, [email protected]
Review of Walter Isaacson's Einstein, His Life and Universe,, NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007, and related sources, given March 17, 2008, Uplands Retirement Village. Pleasant Hill, TN. Drafted: 27-Feb-08.
Journalist Walter Isaacson, author of 2007 bestseller Einstein, His Life and Universe,1 was Time magazine's editor when his staff chose Einstein as the most important person of the 20th century.2 Isaacson now heads the Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., a leadership think tank.3
Isaacson's biography of Einstein plus another by German
science writer J�rgen Neffe,4 are based on recently opened Albert Einstein's archives, adding to the over 500 existing Einstein biographies. Einstein's life to age 40 based on Isaacson's book is to be filmed. There are other planned Einstein films.5
Why all this interest? Although Einstein is known as a scientific genius, few know of his troubled life, even fewer know how he changed the way we see the universe.
Albert's family: his father Hermann Einstein (1847-1902), at age 29, in Bavaria, Germany, married Pauline Koch (1858-1920), age 18, in 1876, both non-observing Jews. Pauline, a prosperous grain dealer's daughter, was cultured, well read, a pianist and music lover. Hermann, whom she dominated, was generous, thoughtful, a devoted husband and father who failed in business. 6
Albert Einstein was born March 14, 1879, in Ulm, near Stuttgart, Germany. Over 200 years earlier (1685) Isaac Newton's (1642-1727) laws of motion and gravity explained the clockwork mechanism of earth's place in the universe. No one then dreamed that Albert Einstein would dramatically amend Newton's laws.
Albert grew up among electric generators and motors. His uncle, engineer-inventor Jakob Einstein (1850-1912), was electrifying southern German towns, following Thomas Edison (1847-1931) lead in New York City.7 Pauline Einstein, with a family loan, encouraged husband Hermann's partnership with Jakob. After Albert's birth, the Einsteins moved (1880) from Ulm to Munich for better business opportunity.
Albert's big head at birth and his being a late talker evoked parental fear that he was abnormal. Albert later told a biographer, "My parents were worried because I started to talk comparatively late, and they consulted a doctor�."8
At 2 his only sibling sister was born, Marie, called "Maja" (M-a-j-a) Einstein (1881-1951), who later described him as quiet and introspective.9
When Albert was age 4 and ill, his father gave him a compass to play with. Albert later wrote: "When I saw�[its needle always point north, no matter how I turned it], the fact that it behaved in such a fixed way changed my understanding of the world. Until then, I thought that one thing had to touch another to make it move�. I realized that something deeply hidden had to lie behind things."10 This was an early hint of his lifelong search for unity in nature.
Albert's schooling: kept at home until age 7, taught the 3 Rs by a tutor, he was enrolled in a nearby Catholic primary school, ages 7 to 9, 1885-88. He did well academically, received Catholic religious instruction in school plus state-required private Jewish instruction from a relative at home.
Taken as a little boy to watch a Prussian military parade, he cried out in horror: "I don't want to be [regimented like]�those poor people."11 He disliked school discipline and rote learning, especially in secondary school at Munich's Luitpold Gymnasium, 6 years, ages 9 to 15, 1888-94.
Good in science and math, less interested in other subjects, he irritated some of his teachers by questioning their knowledge. In family legend, asked about Albert's potential, his headmaster said: "�he'll never make a success." Told by a teacher that he was not welcome in class, Albert said he had done nothing wrong. His teacher said: "Yes, �but you sit there in the back row and smile and your mere presence here spoils the respect of the class for me." . Albert later called his primary teachers sergeants, his gymnasium teachers lieutenants.12
Uncle Jakob taught him algebra. He mastered calculus by age 12. Math and science books reinforced his appreciation of orderliness in nature. He later said: "As a boy of 12, I was thrilled to see that it was possible to find out truth by reasoning alone, without the help of any outside experience."13
Piano and violin lessons, urged by his mother; made him a lifelong violinist. He saw harmony and unity in music, science, and nature.
Max Talmey (1867-1941), 21, a poor Polish Jewish medical student, invited to Thursday night dinners from 1889 for a few years, shared with Albert, age 10, table talk on science, math, and philosophy.14
Talmey gave Albert a popular natural science book series describing current scientific experiments.15 It was full of imaginative, creative what-ifs, leading Albert at 16 to ask: what if I could ride alongside a beam of light?
Asked years later (1921) what he thought of these books, Albert said: very good books, "[They] exerted a great influence on my whole development."16
Talmey, who influenced Albert at an impressionable age, remarked in his 1932 book about young Albert's "exceptional intelligence [which enabled him to discuss with me, a college graduate,] subjects far beyond the comprehension of so young a child."17
Albert, religious before age 10, a religious doubter from age 12, read with Talmey philosopher Immanuel Kant's (1724-1804) Critique of Pure Reason, discussed Kant's premise that the universe can be understood by thought alone. Albert read and agreed with philosopher Benedict Spinoza (1632-77) that God works through nature's orderliness.
Business failure led the Einsteins to move to Italy near their northern Italy partner firm in Milan, then in nearby Pavia. Albert at 15 needed 3 more years to complete secondary school. His parents decided he should remain in Munich where an Einstein relative would look after him until he graduated.
Lonely, unhappy, Albert looked for a way out of the Munich Gymnasium, which he disliked, knowing some teachers disliked him. He also dreaded German compulsory military service at age 17, two years ahead.
Albert asked his family physician for a letter stating that because of isolation from his family he was suffering from nervous exhaustion and needed the bracing air of northern Italy. From his math teacher he got a letter listing his high math scores.
Albert, high school dropout, took a train to Pavia, Italy,18 arriving unexpectedly at his parents' home. He told them why he had dropped out of school and how he planned to continue his education.
He would study on his own, take the entrance exam in autumn 1895 to enter the highly regarded Polytechnic College in Zurich, Switzerland,19 which did not require secondary school graduation if an applicant passed its difficult entrance examination, which he would take in autumn 1895. He also said: I want to renounce my German citizenship.
His parents listened, concerned. His father prudently delayed submitting renunciation of German citizenship forms until Albert in Switzerland had applied for Swiss citizenship. Released from German citizenship Jan. 1896, Albert was stateless until granted Swiss citizenship in 1901.
Helping in the family's Pavia shop with its electric lighting equipment, Albert impressed Uncle Jakob by quickly solving electrical problems. Uncle Jakob assured everyone: "You will hear from him yet."
In spring and summer 1895 Albert hiked the Alps and Apennines from Pavia to Genoa to see his maternal Uncle Julius Koch. He visited art and other culture centers, delighting in Italians' natural friendliness, so different from the stern Germans.
Reading physics textbooks helped him prepare for the Zurich Polytechnic entrance exams. He would be 16 when he took the Polytechnic entrance test intended for age 18 and older. A family friend got him a waiver of the age requirement.20
Albert passed the Zurich Polytechnic test in math and science but failed other subjects. Polytechnic Director Albin Herzog (1852-1909) suggested that Albert take a final secondary school year of guided study at nearby Aarau high school, whose graduates were automatically admitted to the Zurich Polytechnic.21
Aarau Cantonal High School, 25 miles west of Zurich, influenced by progressive Swiss educator Johann Pestalozzi (1746-1827),22 was teacher-friendly, student-centered, perfect for Albert.
He later told a friend: "In Aarau I made my first rather childish experiments in thinking that had a direct bearing on the Special [Relativity] Theory. If a person could run after a light wave with the same speed as light, you would have a wave arrangement which could be completely independent of time�."23
He boarded with principal Jost and Rosa Winteler. Marie, one of their 7 children, was Albert's first girl friend; she 18, he 16. 24
With the Wintelers, Albert developed a quick wit and debonair jesting manner. When not in class or studying or hiking or playing violin duets or flirting with Marie Winteler, he joined the Winteler family's liberal conversation.25
Graduating from the Aarau Cantonal High School with the second highest grades except in French, he wrote of his future plans as follows:
"�I will enroll in the Zurich Polytechnic. I will stay there four years [1896-1900] to study mathematics and physics�. I will be a teacher �of these sciences�. �[I have a] talent for abstract�thinking�. I am attracted by�the profession of science."26
Albert enrolled, Oct. 29, 1896, in Zurich Polytechnic's department headed by Prof. Heinrich Weber (1942-1913) preparing secondary school math and physics teachers.27
Romance came to Albert at Zurich Polytechnic. He met Mileva Maric (1875-1948), the only woman student in this department, from Novi Sad, Serbia, daughter of a wealthy landowner and judge. She limped slightly.28
Mileva, bright in math and physics, determined to succeed, had won top honors in an all-male Serbian scientific school. She at 21, Albert at 17, casual friends, hiked together in the summer of 1897. Albert admired Mileva's science interest and for being, like himself, a rebel, outsider, survivor.29
Friendship ripened into love. Mileva Maric became, in Walter Isaacson's words: "Einstein's muse, partner, lover, wife [16 years, 1903-19]�and [finally] antagonist."30
In his last two years at Zurich Polytechnic Albert skipped Prof. Heinrich Weber's physics lectures, disappointed at Weber's neglecting contemporary physics. Albert read, discussed with friends, James Clerk Maxwell's (1831-79) books on Electricity and Magnetism, 1873; and Matter and Motion, 1876.
Albert irritated his major professor by addressing him as "Herr Weber" instead of the more respectful "Herr Professor." Prof. Weber gave Albert a dressing down (1898-99): "You're a clever boy. But you have one great fault: you'll never let yourself be told anything."31
Albert's other physics professor, Jean Pernet (1845-1902) asked his assistant: "What do you make of Einstein? He always does something different from what I have ordered." The assistant replied, "He does indeed, Herr Professor, but his solutions are right and the methods he uses are of great interest."32
Albert focused on physics, less on math. He later regretted skipping math Prof. Hermann Minkowski's (1864-1909) advanced math lectures.33
Studying what interested him, Albert risked failing final exams. Friends tutored him: Mileva Maric, engineering student Micheleangelo Besso,34 math major Marcel Grossmann (1878-1936). Grossmann, whose lecture notes particularly helped, understood Albert's independent spirit, recognized Albert's talents, and told his parents, "This Einstein will one day be a great man."35
Albert barely passed his final exams. Mileva Maric failed but planned to try again.36
Financial aid from his family stopped on Albert graduation. His fellow graduates all received coveted teaching or research assistantships. Albert applied far and wide but no one answered.
Albert complained that Prof. Heinrich Weber's bad references prevented his getting a job. Mileva attributed his joblessness to anti-Semitism and his rebel attitude: " You know my sweetheart has a sharp tongue."37
Today we're shocked that Einstein, an acknowledged genius, could not find an academic job after college graduation. For 18 months his only income was from short term poorly paid substitute teaching.
Isaacson described him in this jobless period as: "Einstein the Nobody." His father Hermann, knowing Albert had twice unsuccessfully applied for an assistantship to one professor, wrote that professor, without telling Albert:
"My son Albert, �22�, unhappy with his present lack of position,�is oppressed �that he is a burden on us, people of modest means�.�I have taken the liberty of [asking you] to�write him� a few words of encouragement, so that he might recover his joy in living and working. �If�you could secure him an Assistant's position�my gratitude would know no bounds�. Hermann Einstein." No reply ever came.38
Opposed to Albert's romance with Mileva Maric, Albert's mother thought Mileva unsuitable, older, unhealthy, non-Jewish, a foreigner. During summer 1900 family vacation his mother asked Albert, "What will become of your Dollie now?"39
Albert replied: engagement and marriage. His mother wept. Still worse, she and Albert's father sent a jointly signed letter to Mileva Maric's parents listing reasons against the marriage.
A job possibility arose. Albert's friend Marcel Grossmann told his father of Albert's joblessness. Grossmann's father spoke to his friend, Swiss Patent Office Director Friedrich Haller (1844-1936). Haller told Albert to apply when a Patent Office job was posted. On this possibility, Albert moved to Bern, Swiss capital, where the Patent Office was located.
Albert and Mileva had a romantic interlude at Lake Como on the Swiss-Italian border, spring 1901. Mileva wrote Albert she was with child. Albert promised to find a job "no matter how humble�[and despite] my scientific goals and my personal vanity."40
Albert was with his family the summer of 1901 when Mileva retook her failed Zurich Polytechnic final exams. Three months pregnant, sick, her pregnancy a secret, with Albert's parents opposed to their marriage, Mileva failed again. Nor was Albert with her when, home in Serbia, she gave birth to a baby girl Lieserl, early Feb. 1902.41
Albert never saw, his parents never knew, the world never knew about Lieserl until 1986 from newly found Einstein family letters. Why the secrecy? Speculating from Albert's then troubled situation--he was the jobless, unconventional, near-bohemian father of an illegitimate child, unable to support a family, whose parents opposed his love mate. If he became publicly tarred as immoral he might not get the Swiss Patent Office job.
Mileva, in Serbia, her family helping, cared for the baby, exchanged anxious love letters with Albert, patiently awaited his hoped for job, his promised marriage. Historians speculate that Mileva's close friend in Serbia took custody of Lieserl, that Lieserl died of scarlet fever.42
Needing money, awaiting the Patent Office job, Albert's ad in a Bern newspaper: "Private lessons in Mathematics and Physics�.. Trial lessons free," attracted several local students.43
Albert's lectures to the jokingly named "Olympia Academy" students gave way to freewheeling discussions on physics, philosophy, classic books, over food and drink, on country walks, and on mountain hikes.44
Albert was finally appointed Swiss Patent Office Technical Expert Class 3 Provisional, June 16, 1902. Director Friedrich Haller instructed him: "When you pick up an application think that everything the inventor says is wrong." Be critical, vigilant, question every premise, challenge everything--an approach Albert liked. 45
Soon expert in judging patent applications, Albert rushed through the day's work, did his own thought experiments, hid his notes when visitors or Director Haller approached. The Patent Office job, Albert later wrote: "�enforced my many-sided thinking and also provided important stimuli to�thought[s on physics]."46
Hermann Einstein, 55, dying in Milan, Italy, Oct. 10, 1902, gave Albert permission to marry Mileva Maric. Albert wept. He and Mileva were married Jan. 6, 1903, in a civil ceremony attended only by two "Olympia Academy" friends.
With a steady job, income, marriage, regularity, Albert and Mileva had a son, Hans Albert Einstein, born May 14, 1904.47 Albert also had from 1904 as Patent Office co-worker his close friend Michelangelo Besso to share science ideas. They continually discussed how mass (or matter), light, space, time were related. Between 1901-04 Albert wrote and published reviews of new physics writings and several so called "practice papers."
Then, in March-April-May 1905�on ideas occupying his mind for years--Albert wrote and had published, four papers plus his doctoral dissertation in the German physics journal, Annalen der Physik. When their originality and importance were recognized, physicists took notice. Of this 1905 "Miracle Year" he later wrote: "A storm broke out in my mind."
First of Albert's four 1905 papers was on the photo-electric effect of light, long thought to be a wave. Light, Albert wrote, is also fast-moving particles. When electrons in light particles hit some metals they warm the metals, releasing electrons from the metals. This photo-electric effect of light is the basis of light-operated automatic garage and other door openers, laser beams used in surgery, compact disks, television screens, PET scans imaging for cancer, etc.
Albert's photo-electric effect paper also helped establish Quantum Physics, the study of the erratic behavior of electrons circling protons inside atoms. This photo-electric effect paper, verifiable and practical, won Albert the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics.48
Albert's second 1905 paper explained "Brownian Movement," named after Scottish botanist Robert Brown (1773-1858). In 1827 Brown found under a microscope that tiny grains of pollen placed in water moved about irregularly. Albert proved, 78 years later, that water molecules randomly hitting the pollen grains caused the jittery motion. His paper convinced doubting scientists that molecules and atoms exist, are active, and can be mathematically quantified.49
His third 1905 paper on Special Theory of Relativity was more important, less understood. We think we sit still in this room. But we move, everything in the universe moves, relative to our earth which turns on its axis, revolves around our sun, which revolves with other suns in our Milky Way galaxy, which revolves among a spiral of other galaxies, and so on.
Isaac Newton's laws since 1685 held that apples fall, heavenly bodies orbit, space and time are separate and fixed because of gravity. Albert's different idea came from James Clerk Maxwell's finding in 1873 that light, moving at 186,000 miles per second, is actually the visual form of an electromagnetic wave.
Building on two certainties�physics laws are the same everywhere; nothing travels faster than light�Albert's insight was that all objects move, all events occur, relative to an observer's place and rate of movement.
On his daily streetcar ride home from work, looking back, Albert saw Bern, Switzerland's famous Clock Tower receding. He thought: if his streetcar heading away from the Clock Tower could approach the speed of light, its clock hands would seem to stop while his own pocket watch ticked normally.
On earth, Albert knew, where the fastest moving thing is a tiny fraction the speed of light's 186,000 miles per second, Newton's laws hold firm. Time and space do seem separate and fixed. But on a fast moving spaceship, approaching the speed of light, a clock aboard it slows down.
The faster the spaceship, the more its clock slows down, called Time Dilation. Time Dilation has been proved. In 1971 two identically set atomic clocks, one stationary on the ground, the other jet-flown around the world, when compared, showed that the jet flown clock had slowed down.
To humans inside a speeding spaceship, Albert reasoned, all seems normal. But as the spaceship approaches a stationary outside observer--to that observer--the front-part of the approaching spaceship looks shortened, its end-part looks lengthened after passing. This Space Dilation, like sound dilation, is a doppler effect: high shrill sound from on-coming police/fire/emergency vehicle; ever fainter note as the vehicle disappears; the "swoosh" of a fast passing car.
Albert's findings--startling, revolutionary, strange even to him--took time to be absorbed, argued about, understood, tested, and ultimately accepted.
Albert's genius was to think differently, outside common thought, "outside the box." Everything in his rebellious, mixed up life led to these 1905 intuitive grand discoveries.
Albert worked out mathematical proof that Time and Space are not fixed, not separate, but are interwoven as spacetime. To our 3 dimensions of length, width, and height he added a fourth dimension of spacetime.50
Albert's short fourth 1905 paper, a footnote to his third Special Theory of Relativity paper, held that matter and energy are similar and can be converted one into the other.
He surmised this conversion in l902 when Marie Curie (1867-1934) discovered that uranium from pitch-blend, which is matter, gave off electronic radiation, which is energy. From this matter-to-energy conversion came Albert's formula, E=mc2.
E for Energy equals mass (which is, matter), multiplied by c (c for celeritus, Latin for speed of light), squared. 186,000 miles per second, squared, is so huge a number that if atoms on a pinhead could be split apart, those atoms would explode like an atom bomb.51
Biographer Walter Isaacson wrote: "Einstein's 1905 burst of creativity was astonishing. He had devised a revolutionary quantum theory of light, helped prove the existence of atoms, explained Brownian motion, upended the concept of space and time, and produced what would become science's best known equation."52
Albert knew that his Special Theory of Relativity covered only bodies moving parallel in straight lines at constant speeds.
It would take him 10 years to find a General Theory of Relativity, backed by math, that explained how and why bodies in space move at varying speeds in curved motion around other bodies.
Pondering his General Theory of Relativity in spare time, Albert never imagined that when proven, during unique end-of-WW I circumstances, he would be world famous.53
Waiting to be recognized, still needing Patent Office income, he wrote other scholarly papers and also completed his Ph.D. dissertation for the University of Zurich, summer 1905.54
His application to be a University of Bern lecturer required submitting another original physics paper. This allowed him to lecture, unpaid except for student fees, 1908-1909. He had to lecture early, before Patent Office hours, and so had few students.55
First to inquire about Relativity was world renowned University of Berlin physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) who soon added Relativity to his own lectures.56
Planck's assistant, Max von Laue (1879-1960), sent to Bern to consult Albert, was surprised to find him working as a lowly Patent Office clerk.
Noticed, at last, Albert received job offers and in a few years rose to the highest academic rank.
Appointed associate professor of physics at the University of Zurich, 1909-10, Albert resigned from the Patent Office July 6, 1909. His best thinking had been done here for 7 years. He moved with Mileva, and 5-year old Hans Einstein to Zurich, Oct. 15, 1909, where their second son Eduard was born, July 28, 1910.57
He next became full professor at German Speaking Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague, 1911-12. From there he attended a science conference in Brussels, Belgium, October 1911. At 32, the youngest physicist present, he met for the first time the greatest living physicists of the time, including Marie Curie.58
Albert next became physics professor at Zurich Polytechnic, 1912- 1914, his alma mater, then granting Ph.D's, a fortunate move because his friend Marcel Grossmann, then head of the Polytechnic's math department, taught him tensor calculus for curved space Albert would need to prove his 1915 General Theory of Relativity.
Albert's last European position was at the prestigious University of Berlin, 914 to 33, 19 years, through World War I, Germany's defeat and economic collapse, and Hitler's rise to power, which forced Albert's move to the U.S. in 1933.59
Raising two boys, the younger one, Eduard, a schizophrenic, Mileva's science interest had waned. She resented Albert's several extra-marital affairs, was bitter that he took the prestigious Berlin position partly to be near his divorced cousin Elsa Einstein (1876-1936), with whom he had an affair.
Marital friction deepened. Albert wrote out conditions under which he would live with Mileva: "You make sure . . . that I receive my three meals regularly in my room. You are neither to expect intimacy nor to reproach me in any way."60 They separated. Mileva and the two boys left Berlin July 1914 for Zurich, Switzerland. WW I began the next month, Aug. 1, 1914.
To get Mileva to agree to a divorce, Albert promised her and the boys the money from the Nobel Prize in Physics award he expected, having been nominated annually since 1910. Long divorce proceedings ended Feb. 14, l919. Albert admitted adultery.
Elsa, Albert's cousin, married, then divorced,61 lived with her two daughters Lisa and Margot in Berlin, where Albert visited her in 1912, before taking the Berlin job.
Separation and divorce from Mileva, overwork, careless of regularity, Albert, seriously ill during 1917-19, was restored by Elsa. They married June 2, 1919. Elsa gave him regularity, protection, freedom to think and write.
Albert's first insight into his 1915 General Theory of Relativity came in a thought-experiment in 1907 while still at the Patent Office: if a workman fell from a roof, until he hit the ground, he and everything on him would be weightless in free fall. So too would be people in a falling elevator atop a tall building whose holding cable had snapped.
His surprising insight was that moving heavenly bodies, like people and objects in free fall, carry spacetime with them.
His insights, greatly simplified, were: 1-The larger a moving heavenly body is, the more curved spacetime it carries with it. 2-Newton's gravity is really curved spacetime. 3-When starlight reaches a large mass like the sun that starlight will be slightly bent by the curved spacetime around the sun's enormous mass. 4-If he figured the precise arc of light-bent around an eclipsed sun, then a photograph of that eclipse would prove his General Theory of Relativity.
Helped by tensor calculus for curved space taught him by math friend Marcel Grossmann, Albert published his General Relativity paper, March 20, 1915, with a 1916 revision.62
In 1917 with WW I raging, Britain's Royal Astronomer Frank Watson Dyson (1868-1939) planned for Cambridge University astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944) to head a British team to photograph an eclipse predicted two years hence, on May 29, 1919.63
A photo team went to Principe, a Portuguese island off West Africa; another photo team went to Sobral, northern Brazil, the two best viewing sites. Photos confirmed Einstein's predicted degree of light deflection. Einstein's General Relativity Theory was proven true.
This news drew England's greatest scientists to the Great Room, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London, Nov. 6, 1919. After reports by Dyson and Eddington, Royal Society Pres. J. J. Thomson said: "If�Einstein's reasoning holds �then [this] is�one of the highest achievements of human thought."64
London Times, Nov. 7, 1919, headline: "Revolution in Science. New Theory of the Universe. Newton's Ideas Overthrown." Similar headlines, with Einstein's photo, emblazoned world newspapers, helped make Einstein an instant hero.65
This hero worship was really the public's expression of relief that the long, bloody, devastating WW I was over. God, morality, good will, peace on earth�which many thought had died in the trenches--were restored.
With peace came news that Einstein, an anti-war German-born Swiss citizen, had discovered something new about the universe. His discovery was confirmed by an English pacifist Quaker scientist. Peaceful international scientific cooperation temporarily replaced WW I hatred.
Albert, amazed at the adulation, called the newspaper accounts "amusing feats of imagination." The war-weary public, needing someone to idolize and lionize, embraced this stunned, sad-starry-eyed long-wiry-haired, unkempt, floppily dressed, absent-minded Einstein. What Relativity meant did not matter. His opinion was asked about everything under the sun. His disarming, witty replies, widely reported, brought smiles. His wife Elsa Einstein loved the attention.
The Nobel Prize in Physics committee, embarrassed for by-passing Einstein since 1910, awarded Albert its 1921 prize, not for controversial Relativity, but for his practical 1905 photo-electric effect paper. The prize money, $32,000, went as promised to ex-wife Mileva Maric and their sons.66
Albert never understood the public adulation but he used it as a platform for his pacifist views. He publicly criticized fellow scientists who worked for Germany's war effort in poison gas and flame throwers.
He stated publicly that if even 2% of military draftees refused to serve, all war machines would grind to a halt. Anti-Semitism, his pacifism, and his public opposition to the early Nazis made him a marked man in Germany.
With Hitler's rise Einstein's books were burned as "Jewish science." A price was put on his head dead or alive. His Berlin bank funds were blocked. His country home at Carputh near Berlin was ransacked. He fled to the U.S., worked at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, N.J., 22 years, from 1933 to his death.
Hitler's atrocities modified Einstein's pacifism. Refugee European physicists told him that Nazi scientists were close to splitting the uranium atom to make a devastating bomb. His Aug. 2, 1939, letter to Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt warning of the catastrophic danger, along with British intelligence pressure, led to the Manhattan Project.67
Learning of the atom bombs dropped on Japan to end WWII, he regretted having been involved. Still seeking a unified theory to explain everything, still searching to know the mind of God, still scribbling formulas on paper, he died of a burst stomach aneurysm in Princeton Hospital, N.J., April 18, 1955, age 76.68
Why Einstein? What spurred his early efforts�1905, 1915--to explain the mysteries of the universe, alone, without university connections, no collegial help, little library access?
He overcame life's hurts: the teacher who said he would never amount to much; Zurich Polytechnic professors who put him down; prejudice which kept him jobless; parental rejection of Mileva, his illegitimate child; his failed father's death in debt leaving his mother without income.
Curiosity was his spur: self-confidence, stick-to-it-tivness, an insatiable drive to discover how the universe worked.
From Galileo he learned that all planets and objects move, every event occurs, relative to an observer's frame of reference.
From Isaac Newton's law of gravity he learned that stars and planets, according to size/mass, exert a gravitational "pull" on each other.
Michael Faraday's (1791-1867) electromagnetism on which his father and uncle's electric business was based, led him to James Clerk Maxwell.
Maxwell's mathematical proof that light at 186,000 miles per second is the visible form of Faraday's electromagnetism, sparked his probing thought experiments.
A workman falling off a roof, a falling elevator full of people, all weightless in free fall, like heavenly planets, carry spacetime with them.
Spacetime is Newton's gravity.
Spacetime bends light. if light entered a hole in the side of a falling elevator, the millisecond it took the light to reach the other side of the elevator, it would hit the other side at a slightly higher level because of the downward moving elevator.
From this came the thought: light bends when it hits spacetime around a moving mass.
Einstein's E=mc2 founded modern cosmology, led scientists to search for the origin of the universe and the beginning of spacetime in a mammoth Big Bang 13.7 billion year ago, filling our expanding universe, bursting constantly from our sun, and other suns.
Our sun's E=mc2 energy works its way up from deep layers inside our earth through volcanoes on land and ocean floors; pushes up chemicals below to fertilize soil; gives us grass, flowers, trees, bread, meat, vegetables, life; fills our clouds with carbon dioxide for a protective greenhouse above a habitable life-giving earth.
Einstein's E=mc2 gave us nuclear energy for industry and home lights. Nuclear power lights 80% of France, including its Eiffel Tower.
Einstein's E=mc2 surrounds us. Smoke detectors draw energy from tiny bits of americium. Exit signs in shopping malls, movie houses, theaters, auditoriums�when electricity cuts off--still functions from encapsulated radioactive tritium. 69
Hospitals' powerful imaging devices, PET scans (Positron Emission Tomography) depend on radioactive oxygen isotopes.
Einstein's genius, Walter Isaacson concluded, was his imagination guided by faith in nature's unity.
Young Einstein rebelled against the status quo to give us a new view of the universe. Old Einstein resisted Quantum Physics, which he helped found, because its followers denied certainty in nature, believing that probabilities are all we can rely on. Nature's God, Einstein said, " does not play dice."
This rebel, guided by secular faith, was a serenely amused loner, non-conformist, independent thinker, driven by imagination. He helped usher in our modern age.
F: We enjoyed reviewing this book. Thank you for being here. The Footnotes below include more than we could say in an hour.
(References Below Include: 1-Books Read by Authors, 2-Footnotes, 3-Best Albert Einstein Internet Sources, 4-About the Authors):
Books Read by Authors
1. Aczel, Amir D. S. God's Equation: Einstein, Relativity, and the Expanding Universe. NY: Four Walls Eight Windows, 1999.
2. Bodanis, David. E=mc2: A Biography of the World's Most Famous Equation. NY: Walker & Co., 2000.
3. Caliprice, Alice, Editor. Dear Professor Einstein. Foreword by Evelyn Einstein. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002. Children's letters to and from Einstein.
4. Clark, Ronald W. Einstein: The Life and Times. NY: World Publishing Co., 1956.
5. Cwiklik, Robert. Albert Einstein and the Theory of Relativity. Hauppauge, NY: Barron's Educational Series. Profiles in science for young people, ages 12-13.
6. Hoffman, Banesh, with Collaboration of Helen Dukas. Albert Einstein, Creator and Rebel. NY: Viking Press, 1972.
7. Ireland, Karin. Albert Einstein. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Silver Burdett Press, 1989.
8. Isaacson, Walter. Einstein, His Life and Universe. NY: Simon & Schuster, 2007.
9. Lakin, Patricia. Albert Einstein, Genius of the Twentieth Century. NY: Aladdin, 2005.
10. Overbye, Dennis. Einstein in Love: A Scientific Romance. NY: Penguin Books, 2000.
11. Parker, Barry. Einstein's Brainchild, Relativity Made Easy. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2000.
12. Schwartz, Joseph and Michael McGinness. E=MC2: Einstein for Beginners. NY: Pantheon Books, 1979.
13. White, Michael and John Gribbin. Einstein, A Life in Science. NY: Penguin, 1993.
14. Zackheim, Michele. Einstein's Daughter, The Search for Lieserl. NY: Penguin Putnam, 1999.
Footnotes
1. Authors Franklin and Betty J. Parker wanted to review this Einstein biography because Einstein's theories were central in Stephen Hawking, A Briefer History of Time, 2005, which we reviewed, April 18, 2007. In that review we realized that although Einstein is an acknowledged science genius, few know of his troubled life, even fewer know how he changed our view of the universe. Our aim is to clarify his life and his enormous contributions. Our Hawking review can be accessed at:
http://www.toadfire.com/blog_full.jsp?blogID=3469
or: http://bfparker.blog.co.uk/2007/01/15/universe_big_bang_black_holes_dialogue_o~1556047 or:http://bfparker.blog.co.uk/2007/01/15/universe_big_bang_black_holes_dialogue_o%7E1556047
Isaacson's Acknowledgement credits experts who checked his book's accuracy, including several editors of Einstein's papers and some 10 prominent physicists and science historians. See Isaacson, pp. xv-xviii,
2. Interviewed on Dec. 7, 1999, Isaacson told why the then editors, previous editors, and consulting historians chose Albert Einstein as Person of the 20th Century. For Isaacson's discussion of Einstein's importance and Einstein's views on God, see:
http://www.time.com/time/community/transcripts/1999/122799isaacson.html
3. For description of Aspen Institute, Washington, D.C., leadership discussion group with world-wide connections, see:
http://www.aspeninstitute.org/site/c.huLWjeMRKpH/b.4939471
4. For book reviews of J�rgen Neffe, Einstein: A Biography. NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007 (with some comparisons to Walter Isaacson's 2007 Einstein biography), see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=J%C3%BCrgen+Neffe%2C+Einstein%2C+reviews&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
5. For 2008 Albert Einstein film projects, see: http://search.curryguide.com/execute/search/nph-web.cgi?query=Albert+Einstein%2C+film+rights&x=20&y=7&ac=pandia&adbg=ffffff&intprom=s&where=
6. For Albert Einstein's parents, see Isaacson, Chap. Two,
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Albert+Einstein's+parents&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Albert+Einstein%27s+parents&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
7. For Thomas Edison's (1847-1931) Pearl Street generator station, lower Manhattan, New York City, which first electrified a square mile of NYC buildings on Sept. 4, 1882,
see:
http://search.curryguide.com/execute/search/nph-web.cgi?query=Edison%2C+Pearl+Street%2C+Manhattan%2C+NYC&x=16&y=7&ac=pandia&adbg=ffffff&intprom=s&where=
and:
http://search.curryguide.com/execute/search/nph-web.cgi?query=Edison%2C+Pearl+Street%2C+Manhattan%2C+NYC&x=16&y=7&ac=pandia&adbg=ffffff&intprom=s&where=
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Thomas+Edison%2C+Pearl+Street%2C+Manhattan%2C+NYC&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and
http://www.google.com/search?q=Thomas+Edison%2C+Pearl+Street%2C+Manhattan%2C+NYC&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
8. For "Einstein, deformed as baby" and as a late talker,
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+believed+deform+as+baby&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US23
and
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+believed+deform+as+baby&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
One account has little Albert saying for the first time at a meal, "The soup is too hot." His relieved parents asked, "Why haven't you spoken like this before?" His alleged reply was, "So far everything has been in order."
9. Marie (called Maja) Einstein (1881-1951) and Albert were close all their lives. She later earned a doctorate in Romance Languages, University of Bern, Switzerland, 1909; married Paul Winteler, 1910; moved with him near Florence, Italy; fled to the U.S. in 1939 to escape persecution of Jews in Italy (husband Paul Winteler could not enter the U.S. for health reasons); and lived with her brother Albert Einstein on 112 Mercer Street, Princeton, NJ, until her death at age 70, June 25, 1951. For her writing on her brother Albert's boyhood,
see:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dYpwdLWNR2cC&pg=PR15&lpg=PR15&dq=Maja+Winteler-Einstein,+Albert+Einstein&source=web&ots=BWjdGz7UTt&sig=boQnK9ICSMx2xYBzwogQUijXYbU
and:
http://books.google.com/books?id=dYpwdLWNR2cC&pg=PR15&lpg=PR15&dq=Maja+Winteler-Einstein,+Albert+Einstein&source=web&ots=BWjdGz7UTt&sig=boQnK9ICSMx2xYBzwogQUijXYbU
For more on sister Maja and Albert's younger years, see:
http://www.einstein-website.de/biographies/einsteinmaja_content.html
and many entries under "Maja Winteler-Einstein�Einstein, Albert" at:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Maja+Winteler-Einstein%2C+Albert+Einstein&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
10. For Einstein age 4, ill, "Einstein, compass"�hidden behind things," see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+compass&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
11. For "Einstein as a boy disliking a Prussian-style military parade," see: Isaacson, p. 21, and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+boy%2C+military+parade&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
12. For "�he'll never make a success," see Clark, p. 10. For "primary teachers as sergeants" see Isaacson, p. 21. On the later scientific value of his slowness as a boy, Einstein wrote: �"that his slow development and backwardness aided him in developing his theories. The normal adult never thinks about space and time. These are thoughts that he has thought about when he was a child. But since my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up. Naturally, I could go deeper into the problem than a child with normal abilities."
Sources:
http://www.jewishmag.com/59mag/einstein/einstein.htm
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+school%2C+He+will+never+amount+to+much.&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234&aq=t
13. Isaacson, pp. 17-18.
14. On Talmey: It was an old Jewish custom to invite a poor student to family meals, as depicted in Sholem Aleichim's (1859-1916) Fiddler on the Roof (film) when milkman Teyve invites the traveling university student to a Friday evening meal. See: Isaacson, pp. 18, 19-20, 23, 82, 294-295; and
http://www.chem.harvard.edu/herschbach/Einstein_Student.pdf
15. Aaron Bernstein (1812-84), People's Books on Natural Science. Born Max Talmud (Talmud means instruction or the authoritative body of Jewish tradition), his name was changed to Max Talmey when he immigrated to the U.S.
16. Max Talmey, Relativity Theory Simplified and the Formative Period of its Inventor, With an Introduction by George B. Pegram, 1932. Talmud gave Albert a book titled Force and Matter, never imagining that years later Einstein would publish theories of relativity, show that matter could be turned into energy, give the world the famous formula, E =mc2, connect spacetime as one entity, and show that Newton's gravity was really curved spacetime.
17. For many entries on "Einstein, Talmey,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Talmey&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
18. Albert left Munich for Pavia, Italy, Dec. 29, 1894.
19. Called Zurich Polytechnic College in this paper for clarity it was founded in 1854, opened in 1855 as Swiss Federation of Technology, known familiarly as ETH, its German abbreviation. It has always been highly ranked academically with 21 Nobel Laureates associated with it as students or faculty. Albert's first born son Hans Albert Einstein (1904-73) also attended ETH and received his Ph.D. in technical sciences there in 1936. See: Fox & Keck, pp. 49-52;
and:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ETH_Zurich
20. Gustav Maier was the family friend who got Einstein the age waiver to take his first Zurich Polytechnic entrance exam. Maier's banking firm in Ulm, Germany, had been located on the same street as Einstein's grandfather's featherbed factory.
See:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E2DB123BF937A25751COA962948260&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=print
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E02E2DB123BF937A25751COA962948260&sec=health&spon=&pagewanted=print
21. Einstein's first (failed) entrance exam dates were Oct. 8-14, 1895.
22. Pestalozzi's world wide influence included John Dewey's (1859-1952) U.S. child-centered progressive school movement.
23. Einstein added to this thought question (at age 16): �"Of course, such a thing is impossible." Isaacson, p. 26.
24. Jost Winteler (1846-1929) was school principal and history and Greek professor. Another Winteler daughter Anna later married Albert's close friend Micheleangelo Besso. The Winteler son, Paul, later married Albert's sister Maja, forming a life-long Einstein-Winteler connection.
25. For many entries on "Einstein, Winteler,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Winteler&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
26. Einstein's essay on his future plans was written in faulty French. See: Isaacson, p. 31.
27. For entries on Prof. Heinrich Weber, see
(1): http://www-history.mcs.standrews.ac.uk/Biographies/Weber_Heinrich.html
(2): http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Heinrich+Weber&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
28. For "Einstein, Marie Winteler," her despondency, breakdown, and recovery after Einstein broke off their romance, and on her later marriage and life,
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Marie+Winteler&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Marie+Winteler&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
29. Albert called Mileva "Dollie"; she called him "Johnnie." See Isaacson index for many entries under Maric, Mileva. For other entries under "Einstein, Mileva Maric:"
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Mileva+Maric&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Mileva+Maric&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
For New York Times articles on Mileva Maric:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?frow=0&n=10&srcht=s&query=Mileva+Maric&srchst=nyt&submit.x=34&submit.y=13&submit=sub&hdlquery=&bylquery=&daterange=full&mon1=01&day1=01&year1=1981&mon2=02&day2=11&year2=2008
and: http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?frow=0&n=10&srcht=s&query=Mileva+Maric&srchst=nyt&submit.x=34&submit.y=13&submit=sub&hdlquery=&bylquery=&daterange=full&mon1=01&day1=01&year1=1981&mon2=02&da
(3) Also from New York Times on Mileva Maric:
http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=Mileva+Maric&srchst=g&submit.x=12&submit.y=9
and: http://query.nytimes.com/search/query?query=Mileva+Maric&srchst=g&submit.x=12&submit.y=9
30. Isaacson, p. 42.
31. Ibid., p. 34.
32. Ibid., p. 35. Einstein ignored Prof. Jean Pernet's lab instructions, caused a lab explosion, which injured Einstein's right hand.
33. Ibid., p. 35. Math Prof. Minkowski later remarked that Einstein was: Q "�a lazy dog [who] never bothers about mathematics at all." Ironically in 1907, 7 years after Albert graduated from Zurich Polytechnic, Prof. Minkowski developed the mathematical framework that made Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity more acceptable to scientists. Prof Minkowski said sometime after 1905: "For me [Einstein's work] came as a tremendous surprise... for in his student days Einstein had been a lazy sluggard [Faulpelz]. He never bothered about mathematics at all."
See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermann_Minkowki
34. Micheleangelo Besso (1873-1955), a mechanical engineer, 6 years older than Einstein, was Einstein's lifelong friend, a sounding board for Einstein's ideas, and acted as an elder brother in Einstein's troubled marriage to and divorce from Mileva Maric. Besso and his wife Anna n�e Winteler Besso also helped care for the Einstein's two sons.
Einstein and Besso both played the violin and had similar science interests. They met while Einstein boarded with Aarau Cantonal high school's principal Jost Winteler whose older daughter Anna Lee married Besso in 1898. The Bessos moved to Milan, Italy, where he was an electrical society's consultant until Einstein, then working at the Bern Swiss Patent Office, knowing of a vacancy, urged Besso to successfully apply.
Reflecting on Besso's death shortly before Einstein's own death (April 18, 1955), he wrote to Besso's son and wife, marveling that Besso had lived so long and happily in harmony with his wife, "an undertaking in which I twice failed rather miserably." Isaacson, p. 540.
35. Marcel Grossmann, whose father owned a factory near Zurich, later helped Einstein in two turning points of his life; first, by persuading his father to speak to the Swiss Patent Office director about Einstein's abilities and need for a job. This led to Einstein's Patent Office job during1902-09. Secondly, then math Prof. Marcel Grossman taught Einstein during 1911-12 (both then taught at Zurich Polytechnic) the special math for curved space Einstein needed for his 1915 General Theory of Relativity. For many entries on "Einstein, Marcel Grossmann,
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Marcel+Grossmann&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Marcel+Grossmann&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
36. Albert Einstein's final exam score at Zurich Polytechnic was 4.9 out of 6, allowing him to graduate with a Diploma on July 28, 1900. Mileva's Maric's failing score was 4 out of 6. Source: White & Gribble pp. 40, 49.
37. Isaacson, p. 61 and:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/bodanis.html
38. Shortened letter from full versions in: Overbye, p. 72, and
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/bodanis.html
39. Neither Marie Winteler nor Mileva Maric were Jewish.
40. For scholarly investigation of Albert Einstein-Mileva irac's love child, see: Michele Zackheim. Einstein's Daughter, The Search for Lieserl. NY: Penguin Putnam, 1999. See also Isaacson, p. 66.
41. Isaacson, Chap. 4, "The Lovers, " especially p. 66.
42. Ibid. Mileva Maric's close friend in Serbia was Helene Kaufler Savic. See: Zackheim's book.
43. Isaacson, Chap 4. For a photo of Einstein and two "Olympia Academy" students, Conrad Habicht (1876-1958) and Maurice Solovine (1875-1958),
see:
http://www.einstein-website.de/z_biography-e.html
44. These self-named Olympia Academy avant garde rebels read and discussed classics, including philosophers Spinoza on God in nature and David Hume (1711-76) on skepticism. They discussed scientists Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1838-1916), French mathematician Henri Poincar� (1854-1912), both of whose works influenced Albert's relativity theories of 1905 and 1915. Isaacson, pp. 79-84, lists other authors and books read by Olympia Academy students.
45. Marcel Grossman first told Einstein of the possible Swiss Patent Office position at Bern in April 1901. Einstein applied for the post in Dec. 1901, was offered the post on June 16, 1902, and started work there on June 23, 1902. His job was confirmed as permanent on Sept. 1904. He was promoted to Technical Expert Second Class on April 1, 1906. He resigned July 6, 1909, to become University of Zurich physics professor. For many entries on "Einstein, Patent Office, Bern, Switzerland,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Patent+Office%2C+Bern%2C+Switzerland&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and: http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Patent+Office%2C+Bern%2C+Switzerland&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
46. For entries on "Einstein, Patent Office, Bern,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Patent+Office%2C+Bern&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and: http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Patent+Office%2C+Bern&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.einsteinyear.org/facts/timeline
47. Albert Einstein's first son, Hans Albert Einstein, born May 14, 1904, who died in 1973, is mentioned in Footnote 19 above.
48. First 1905 photo electric effect paper: Albert Einstein, "On a Heuristic [i.e., Hypothetical] Point of View Concerning the Production and Transformation of Light," Annalen der Physik, Vol. 17 (June 9, 1905), pp. 132-148. For details of all Einstein 1905 "Miracle Year" published writings,
see:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/2509_Einstein_1905.html
http://www.pitt.edu/%7Ejdnorton/teaching/2509_Einstein_1905.html
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+1905%2C+Miracle+Year&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+1905%2C+Miracle+Year&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
49. Second 1905 "Brownian Movement" paper: Albert Einstein, "On the Movement of Small Particles Suspended in Stationary Liquids Required by the Molecular-Kinetic Theory of Heat," Annalen der Physik, Vol. 17 (July 18, 1905), pp. 549-560.
50. Third 1905 Special Relativity paper: Albert Einstein, "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies," Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics, Vol. 17 (Sept. 26, 1905), pp. 891-921.
When Einstein finished his Special Relativity paper he gave his 31 scribbled pages to wife Mileva Maric to check for math errors and fell exhausted into bed. The background and Einstein's thought processes on this third Special Relativity paper are explained in Overbye, Chap. 10; in Isaacson, Chapters 5 and 6;
And:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/einstein/kaku.html
51. For many entries on "Einstein, E=MC2,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+E%3DMC2&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and: http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+E%3DMC2&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
52. Isaacson, p. 140.
53. Few before Einstein made such imaginative leaps. The mystery is how--mostly alone by reading, study, and thought experiment--during 10 hectic troubled years ages 16 to 26, Einstein took insights from earlier scientists' findings and put them together in remarkable ways in his 1905 papers.
We may never know the sources of Einstein's rare intelligence, genius, boldness to be, do, and think differently. His father had a markedly careful way of looking at things from every possible angle. His mother was independent and determined. His Jewish heritage may account for his reverence for an all-knowing God who works through nature's wonders. His early troubled life, the temper of his time, his minority status as a Jew among Christians may all have spurred his drive for thinking about and determination to account for nature's wonders.
54. Einstein's University of Zurich Ph.D. Dissertation (1905): "A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions," 1905, Annalen der Physik, 19 (1906), pp. 289-305, is his least impressive but most cited Einstein publication because of its usefulness. It deals simply with how sugar particles are suspended in a fluid, but has been surprisingly applicable to the way sand particles get stirred up in cement mixers, the properties of cow's milk, and the way fine particles of dust and droplets of liquid (aerosols) are suspended in clouds.
Source:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg14019054.400-the-everyday-world-of-einstein-what-did-albert-want-with-acup-of-sweet-coffee-a-cement-mixer-and-a-dirty-cloud-.html
and:
http://www.pitt.edu/~jdnorton/teaching/2509_Einstein_1905.html
and:
http://www.pitt.edu/%7Ejdnorton/teaching/2509_Einstein_1905.html
55. The "few" students attending Einstein's early morning University of Bern lectures included his friend Michele Besso and his sister Maja, then studying for the University of Zurich Ph.D. in Romance Languages. White & Gribble, p. 75.
56. University of Berlin physicist Max Planck, 21 years older, was Einstein's father figure. Planck's assistant Max von Lau became Einstein's helpful friend. Planck was the first leading physicist to accept and soon lecture on Einstein's relativity theory. As Annalen der Physik editor Planck published Einstein's 1905 papers (also earlier and later papers).
University of Berlin Profs. Planck and Walther Nernst (1864-1941), both went in person to persuade Einstein to work in Berlin (1914-33). Unlike Newton and James C. Maxwell, who saw light as a wave, Planck was the first to consider light as rapidly moving discrete particles, an idea which Einstein incorporated in his 1905 photo-electric effect paper. Planck met with Hitler to argue, unsuccessfully, that the Nazi campaign against the Jews hurt German science. Planck's son was killed by the Gestapo in 1944 for being involved in an unsuccessful Hitler assassination plot. Source: Fox & Keck, pp. 216-219.
57. Einstein's sickly second son Eduard Einstein (1910-65) was diagnosed with schizophrenia in 1930 and died at age 55 in a Zurich mental asylum. As caretaker, his mother Mileva Maric Einstein bore most of the emotional burden, often helped by the Bessos, while Einstein paid the financial cost.
58. Einstein first met at the First Solvay Science Conference, Brussels, Belgium, Oct. 1911, such world renown scientists as France's Marie Curie, French mathematician Jules Henri Poincar� (1854-1912), Germany's Max Planck, New Zealand born Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), and Dutch physicist Henrik A. Lorentz (1853-1928).
Of Einstein's relativity theory Planck wrote: "If Einstein's theory should prove to be correct, as I expect it will, he will be considered the Copernicus of the twentieth century." Source: Aczel, p. 27.
Asked to evaluate Einstein as possible Zurich Polytechnic physics professor, Marie Curie wrote: "I much admire the work which Einstein has published�and think�his work as being in the first rank."
In this same connection J.H. Poincar� wrote of Albert: "The future will show more and more, the worth of Einstein, and the university which is able to capture this young master is certain of gaining much honour from the operation." White & Gribble, p. 109 and Isaacson, pp.168-171.
59. In Berlin during 1914-33 Einstein was also a member of the Prussian Academy of Science and directed research at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. For many entries on "Einstein, University of Berlin,"
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+University+of+Berlin&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+University+of+Berlin&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
60. For Einstein's "living conditions" instructions to his first wife Mileva Maric and of his affairs with other women,
see: http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/einstein/life/family.php
61. Elsa Einstein married textile trader Max Lowenthal (1864-1914) in 1896 and divorced him in 1908. For Elsa Einstein biography, see: http://www.einstein-website.de/biographies/einsteinelsa.html
62. An abortive attempt was made to photo-test a summer 1914 eclipse for Einstein best seen in the Crimea, Russia by Berlin's Royal Prussian Observatory assistant Erwin Freundlich (1885-1964). Freundlich got to the Crimea with photo equipment just as World War I erupted, was captured as a spy, and was luckily released in an exchange of prisoners. This failed attempt strangely helped Albert for he had made a mistake in math so that his degrees of arc of bent-light was slightly off. Had this abortive photo expedition been successful his General Relativity Theory might have been discredited. See: Isaacson, index under Freundlich, Erwin Finlay.
63. Because of WW I communications disruption Einstein sent his 1915 General Relativity paper to University of Leyden (Netherlands) astronomy Prof. Willem de Sitter (1872-1935), who forwarded it via Finland to England's Cambridge University astronomer Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882-1944). Eddington, soon a convinced relativity believer, helped prove Einstein's General Relativity theory true in a 1919 eclipse, resulting in Einstein's near-instant world fame. Source: Clark, pp. 208-09f. For "Einstein, Eddington" entries,
see:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Eddington&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+Eddington&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
64. For entries on the startling results of "Einstein, 1919 eclipse,"
see: Bodanis interview in:
http://www.panmacmillan.com/interviews/displayPage.asp?PageID=3365
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+1919+eclipse&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
and:
http://www.google.com/search?q=Einstein%2C+1919+eclipse&sourceid=navclient-ff&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1B3GGGL_enUS233US234
65. Ibid., for headline news coverage of "Einstein, 1919 eclipse."
66. Nominated annually since 1910 for the Nobel Prize for Physics, Einstein's selection was bypassed because the selection committee thought his relativity theories might be wrong and by anti-Jewish prejudice, led by former (1905) Nobel Physics Prize winner Philipp A. Lenard (1862-1947), a virulent anti-Semite and later dedicated Nazi.
Einstein's Nobel Prize selection was also delayed after 1919 photo eclipse proof of his relativity theory because
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8:08 a.m. - 2007-11-18
Myles Horton (1905-90) of Highlander, New Market, Tenn.: Southern Adult Educator and Social Activist: Bibligraphy & Addendum
Myles Horton (1905-90) of Highlander, New Market, Tenn.: Southern Adult Educator and Social Activist: Bibligraphy & Addendum
By Franklin and Betty J. Parker, 63 Heritage
Loop, Crossville, TN 38571. E-mail: [email protected]
��Highlander first popularized "We Shall Overcome," the civil rights song; and
��Highlander-initiated South Carolina black Sea Islanders' Citizenship Schools spread throughout the South, helped some 100,000 blacks become literate and thus qualified to register to vote, and thus helped advance the 1960s civil rights movement.
To critics he was a rabble rousing "red," a "communist," a threat to American institutions and traditional values. Huge billboard photos in the South in 1965 were captioned, "Martin Luther King at a Communist Training School" (Highlander).
He challenged entrenched power and privilege (as did India's Gandhi); helped workers form labor unions and cooperatives (as did labor organizer Saul Alinsky, 1909-72); helped empower dispossessed people (as did Brazilian adult educator Paulo Freire, 1921-); and helped people realize and achieve their legal rights (as did consumer advocate Ralph Nader, 1934-).
What in Horton's background and upbringing foretold what he was to become?
Youth
He was born in Savannah, TN, July 9, 1905, eldest of four children. His parents, Perry and Elsie Falls Horton, were Tennesseans, Scotch Irish, and poor, although a paternal forebear had received the first land grant (c.1772) in northeast Tennessee.
His parents passed on to Myles their Cumberland Presbyterian Church's Calvinistic values, independent spirit, belief in helping others less fortunate regardless of race, and a respect for education (both parents, with grade school education, had been schoolteachers).
The Hortons moved from Savannah to Humboldt (near Memphis), where Myles went to high school and worked summers. Becoming skeptical about religion, he questioned his mother, who advised him, "just love people."
Eclectic in his reading, he majored in English literature at Cumberland University, Lebanon, TN, 1924-28, refused to take the traditional hazing and organized other students to resist hazing.
Working in a Humboldt box factory in the summer of 1925, he shocked fellow workers by supporting John T. Scopes, on trial in Dayton, TN, for teaching evolution.
As president of his campus YMCA, in his junior year, 1927, he attended a southern YMCA conference on Nashville's Vanderbilt campus. In this, his first contact with foreign and black students, he resented not being able to take a Chinese girl to a restaurant or enter a public library with a black acquaintance.
Then, he was upset when he heard a Labor Day speech on campus by Cumberland University trustee John Emmett Edgerton, a woolen manufacturer and president of the Southern States Industrial Council, lecturing students against labor unions. Northern agitators, Edgerton said, were starting labor unions that would destroy industry and jobs in the South.
On impulse, Horton went to the Edgerton's textile mill in Lebanon, TN, was dismayed at the unfair practices he saw, and urged the workers to organize. University officials threatened to expel him if he visited the mill again.
Ozone, TN, Summer 1927
In summer vacations from Cumberland University, Horton organized vacation Bible schools for the Presbyterian Church. In the summer of 1927 he let his assistants teach the young people at a small Ozone, East Tennessee, church while he invited their parents to discuss their problems.
They asked questions about farming problems, how to get a textile mill job, how to test wells for typhoid, and other concerns. Myles said he'd get experts who knew the answers: a county agent, a health officer, and others.
The 22-year-old realized for the first time that he could lead a discussion without knowing all the answers. He got the adults to talk about their own experiences and found that they already had many answers to their problems.
Ozone people liked these discussions, attendance increased, and a woman about to retire who liked what he was doing said that she would turn over her home to him for such programs. Horton, grateful, said he would think about it and would return when he had something to offer.
"O" for Ozone in his later notes stood for the kind of school he wanted to start. The Ozone experience, he later said, was the genesis of
Highlander.
Union Theological Seminary, 1929-30
Crisscrossing the state as Tennessee YMCA organizer, Myles found a sympathetic listener in Congregational minister Abram Nightingale, with whom he sometimes boarded. Nightingale encouraged Myles's intent to establish a school, saying: you need more learning, more experiences, more contact with ideas and thinkers away from the South.
He encouraged Myles to attend Union Theological Seminary, New York City, and shared with Myles a book by Union Seminary Ethics Professor Harry F. Ward (1873-1966), On Economic Morality and the Ethic of Jesus. Ward held that extremes of wealth and poverty were the Achilles' heel of U.S. free enterprise and that the profit motive hindered Christian brotherhood and equality.
Amid the stock market crash, failed businesses, and jobless bread lines, Myles, at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, met probably the leading social-activist educators in the U.S.
Seeking a philosophy to guide the school he envisioned, he took theology courses, read widely at Columbia University Library near the seminary, worked in a Hell's Kitchen ghetto boys' club, visited Greenwich House and Henry Street Settlement House, and helped organize an International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union strike.
He went to observe a Marion, NC, textile strike; visited Brookwood Labor College, Katonah, NY, which trained labor union leaders (modeled after worker education-oriented Ruskin College, Oxford, England); interviewed old timers at the utopian Oneida Colony, upstate NY, and the cooperative communities at Rugby and Ruskin, TN, and at New Harmony, IN.
He sadly noted that with time the spirit of these once vibrant socialist communities had all but disappeared.
The school he envisioned, he determined, would be loosely structured and adaptable to involve, serve, and help poor people in labor and racial strife, help them find ways to gain dignity, freedom, and justice.
Unconcerned with credits, grades, or a divinity degree, he read the writings of the British Fabian socialists and the writings of American educators John Dewey, George S. Counts, and others.
Observing a New York City May Day parade while unwittingly wearing a red sweater, he was rudely awakened to reality when a mounted policeman clouted him for being a "god-damn Red."
Most influential was liberal theology Professor Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971), a passionate social gospel advocate. Niebuhr had come to Union the previous year, 1928, from a small Detroit church. His Christian ethics seminar, which Horton attended, was the basis of his 1932 book, Moral Man and Immoral Society.
Niebuhr questioned the generally accepted notion of inevitable progress, saw that the poor were oppressed and exploited by the economic and political system, and headed the Fellowship of Socialist Christians, which wanted progressive churches to join with labor unions to achieve fundamental reform.
He co-founded with socialist Norman Thomas a journal, The World Tomorrow, dedicated to "a social order based on the religion of Jesus." Niebuhr saw the reformer's problem as how to achieve equality and justice peacefully; that is, how to pit nonviolently the power of the oppressed against the power of oppressors.
Niebuhr's thesis fitted the aim of Horton's southern adult education school--to help downtrodden people find ways to solve their own problems. To Horton, Niebuhr was sympathetic and encouraging.
University of Chicago, 1930-31
Interested now more in sociology than in theology, Horton went to the University of Chicago. There, he was impressed by sociology Professor Robert E. Park's (1864-1944) theory that individuals unite when they see common goals they can attain by working together.
Through Park, Horton saw that because conflict is inevitable, the thing to do is to use conflict creatively to move people away from the inequities of the status quo and toward fairer economic, political, social, and moral positions.
Horton was also influenced by Lester F. Ward's (1841-1913) Dynamic Sociology, which argued that education requires action and that social progress is possible only through dynamic action.
He talked with and was encouraged by Jane Addams and her colleagues at Hull House. In the spring of 1931 he met two immigrant Danish Lutheran ministers who, when they heard him describe his school ideas, said that they were reminded of the Danish folk school and urged him to visit Denmark.
Reading about Danish folk school history and accomplishments, Horton compiled a pertinent bibliography for the university library. He also read The Southern Highlander in His Homeland by John Charles Campbell (1867-1919), written with Mrs. Campbell who, in 1925, had established the John C. Campbell Folk School near Brasstown, NC, along Danish folk high school lines.
Determined to visit Denmark, Horton earned enough money for travel there by working in New York City as researcher for a professor he had met at the University of Chicago.
Denmark Folk Schools, 1931-32
Visiting Danish folk high schools, Horton appreciated 19th century founder Bishop N.S.F. Grundtvig's (1783-1872) "Living Word" sermons and admired disciple Kristen Kold's folk schools.
These folk schools had awakened oppressed peasants' patriotism and civic responsibility, helped restore Denmark's economic prosperity, and led to cooperatives and a broader based democracy.
Horton liked the newer folk high schools for industrial workers. He admired their informality, close student-teacher interaction, highly motivated learning, and clear objectives.
Christmas night, 1931, Copenhagen
Unable to sleep on Christmas night, 1931, Horton wrote about his future school: it should be located in the South; have white and black students and teachers working together; give no credits nor exams; face problems, propose solutions, and have students try out those solutions in conflict situations in their home communities.
It was to be an adult education school to train leaders who in turn would transform their communities and organizations.
Highlander at Monteagle, November 1, 1932
Horton returned to New York in May 1932 and outlined his school plan to Reinhold Niebuhr, who wrote a finance appeal letter for a school in the South to train "an educated radical labor leadership."
At Niebuhr's suggestion, Horton got his school's first $100 contribution from International YMCA Secretary Sherwood Eddy (1871-1963) and had promise of two Niebuhr graduate students as teachers: one who stayed less than a year, and James A. Dombroski (1897?-1983), son of a Tampa, FL, jeweler, who stayed nearly a decade.
Searching for a school site, Horton contacted Will W. Alexander (1884-1956?) of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. Alexander mentioned Don West, who also wanted to establish a southern Appalachian folk school.
Don West (1906-92), a rural north Georgian and Lincoln University (Harrogate, TN) graduate, was, like Horton, a former campus YMCA president, Bible school organizer in mountain communities, and a Danish folk high school enthusiast.
Horton learned that West, a Vanderbilt Divinity School graduate and Congregational church pastor near Crossville, TN, was attending the YMCA's Blue Ridge Assembly, Black Mountain, NC.
Horton hitchhiked to North Carolina, met and shared common interests with West and, by one account, learned through the Rev. Abram Nightingale that retired college president Lilian Johnson (1864-1968) had offered her Monteagle, TN, farm to be used for community uplift.
This daughter of a wealthy banking and mercantile family had a Cornell University doctorate in history, had been president of Western State College, Oxford, Ohio; was a leading southern suffragist, and a member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. She had gone to Italy to study cooperatives and returned to spread the idea in the South, working from her house and farm in Summerfield, near Monteagle, Grundy County, TN.
Horton and West, with meager financial backing and a small staff, got Lilian Johnson to lease her property for a year and, subject to her satisfaction, perhaps longer.
Highlander Folk School, as it was named, opened November 1, 1932. Only eight students enrolled in its first residence term, November 1932-April 1933, a small beginning. But with the Wilder, TN coal mine strike, 1932-33, 100 miles north of Monteagle, Horton and Highlander became involved for the first time in mineworker union conflict.
Wilder, TN, Mine Strike, 1932-33
The Wilder strike began in the summer of 1932. Mine owners refused to renew a United Mine Workers (UMW) contract unless union members took a 20 percent wage cut. Long critical of mine conditions and company store prices (they were paid in scrip redeemable only in company stores), union miners struck, closing the mines to mid-October 1932, when nonunion scabs and some union members resumed work under armed guards.
Violence flared. The state governor sent in some 200 national guardsmen, whose inexperience, drinking, and favoritism to scabs and mine owners hardly kept the peace.
Myles Horton went to Wilder in November 1932, took notes on the strike, and ate a meager Thanksgiving dinner with UMW local president Barney Graham. Waiting for a bus the next morning, he was arrested, jailed, and charged--as he later humorously recalled--with "coming here and getting information and going back and teaching it." He was released the following day.
To Horton the strike was a conflict situation from which he, Highlander students, and the miners could learn. He and Highlander students helped get and distribute emergency food and clothing. Some strikers thought him a "Red." Others appreciated his and Highlander's help and good intentions. Violence continued.
Horton heard of and told state officials of a plot to kill union president Barney Graham. Horton's warning was ignored. Graham was shot to death April 30, 1933. Their leader dead, the strikers returned to work without a contract and under near starvation conditions.
Said Horton, "If I hadn't already been a radical, [Graham's murder] would have made me a radical right then." The strike helped shape Highlander's labor education program, which thereafter examined the various roles played in labor conflict by newspapers, churches, the power structure, and other community forces.
Wilder also confirmed for Horton what he already knew: the power structure's determination in the 1930s and '40s (omitting the war years) to cripple labor unions.
He later experienced in the 1950s and '60s the power structure mobilization to stem the tide of racial integration in schools and public places.
Zilphia Mae Johnson (Mrs. Myles Horton), 1935
Zilphia was from Paris, Arkansas, attending a 2-month Highlander winter session. This privileged daughter of an Arkansas coal mine operator and College of the Ozarks graduate was a talented, classically trained musician.
Influenced by radical Presbyterian minister Claude Williams, she wanted to use her musical and dramatic talents to advance working people in labor unions. In this, she clashed with and parted from her father. A friend got her to Highlander to learn about the labor movement.
She and Myles fell in love and married March 6, 1935. She then studied about workers' theater at the New Theatre School, New York City. At Highlander, she taught drama, playwriting, public speaking, wrote and directed plays based on labor strikes, and led square dancing and singing.
Zilphia Horton had a gift for using music, drama, and dance to advance labor union concerns and civil rights. She united people, mellowed differences, and lifted spirits. By collecting songs and encouraging Highlander students to collect and sing them, she involved communities around Highlander, helped heal wounds, lessen suspicion, and foster cultural pride.
Through Zilphia, Highlander's cultural programs gained national and even international renown when the British Broadcasting Corporation presented a cultural program from Highlander in March 1937.
She also played a key role in making "We Shall Overcome" a national and international freedom song. Originally a hymn titled "I'll Overcome" and more often "I'll Be All Right," the gospel hymn was sung to handclapping in Black southern Baptist churches.
In 1945, to keep up their spirits, several hundred striking workers of the Congress of Industrial Organizations' Food and Tobacco Workers union, mostly Black women, sang it on a picket line in Charleston, SC. Two union women sang it at Highlander in 1946.
Zilphia Horton recognized its emotional appeal, slowed the tempo, added verses, and sang it at meetings. She taught it to folk singer Pete Seeger (1919-) in New York that year. He altered its title to "We Shall Overcome," added verses, and sang it at 1950s folk song concerts around the country.
Folk singer Guy Carawan (1927-), who with his wife Candie worked at Highlander, further refined it and added the verse, "We shall not be moved," during a police raid on Highlander, the night of July 3, 1951.
In 1960 Guy Carawan taught the song to participants in a southern-wide Highlander workshop. It was also sung that year at the founding convention of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in Raleigh, NC. Within months it became the unofficial theme song of the U.S. civil rights movement and was heard around the world.
Zilphia and Myles Horton were married 21 years, had a son and daughter, when she tragically died. Reaching for a glass she thought held water, she drank some carbon tetrachloride, realized her error, induced vomiting, and phoned her physician, who assured her that she had remedied the accident. But the poison aggravated a kidney condition discovered at Vanderbilt Hospital, Nashville, where she died of uremic poisoning, April 11, 1956.
Citizenship Schools for Voter Registration, 1957-61
Two South Carolina black leaders, later to become more prominent, attended Highlander's August 1954 workshop on "World Problems, the United Nations, and You," comparing discrimination in the South with discrimination in other countries. Esau Jenkins (died 1972), a businessman and community leader from Johns Island, SC, accompanying Septima Poinsette Clark (1898-1987), a Charleston, SC, teacher, was more interested in adult black literacy than in the United Nations.
Esau Jenkins wanted his neighbors to learn to read and write and so qualify to vote. Highlander's staff hesitated, then busy training black leaders for the public school desegregation movement. It took Jenkins and Clark some time to convince Horton that Johns Island blacks needed Highlander's help in getting adult literacy classes started.
These began on Johns Island, spread to other Sea Islands, and then through the South. It was Highlander's most successful training program and significantly increased black voter registration, black political awareness and involvement, and helped elect black mayors, sheriffs, and other officials in the l970s and '80s.
Johns Island, six miles south of Charleston, SC, with a 1954 population of 4,000, is the largest of the Sea Island chain along the South Carolina and Georgia coast. Inhabitants, 67 percent black (other islands had higher black proportions), lived just above subsistence level. Some owned farms and small businesses. Most worked on large truck farms or in Charleston as servants or as factory and shipyard hands.
Gullah was their home language, an African dialect mixed with English. Until the Works Progress Administration built bridges in the 1930s, inhabitants went by boat to Charleston.
Jenkins, a Johns Island leader, had supplemented his fourth grade education with night classes. Converting his small cotton farm to truck farming, he learned enough Greek to help him sell produce to Charleston's Greek vegetable merchants. He was PTA president, church school superintendent, assistant pastor in his church, and also ran a small bus line to the mainland.
During the 45-minute drive, he distributed, explained, and discussed the South Carolina state constitution and voting laws, thus encouraging passengers to learn to read and write to pass voter registration literacy tests.
Black islanders were suspicious and white authorities were hostile to outside do-gooders. To overcome this dilemma, Myles Horton decided to train potential black island leaders at Highlander and send them back to conduct Citizenship Schools. The schools were thus all-black, local, and largely self-taught. Septima Clark sent field reports of progress and problems to Highlander, whose white staff were seldom seen and thus avoided any hostile local newspaper publicity for the first three years.
Horton deliberately chose Bernice Robinson, a black beautician, as the first Citizenship School teacher, who began teaching on January 7, 1957. She was Septima Clark's niece. A black beautician with black customers was not dependent on and hence not intimidated by the white power structure. Her parlor was a community center and she was a natural community leader.
Bernice Robinson (1917-), born in Charleston, earned her high school diploma through night school in New York City, where she went to better herself. Returning to Charleston in 1947 to help her ailing parents, she actively advanced race relations through the YWCA and the NAACP. She could find work only as a self-employed beautician and dressmaker.
Esau Jenkins formed a Progressive Club in order to purchase a building (with a loan from a Highlander grant), sold gasoline outside and groceries inside while citizenship classes were held in the back.
Bernice Robinson treated the adult illiterates as adults, avoiding the use of elementary school teaching materials and child-size school furniture. She taught islanders such practical things as how to write their own names, read and understand a newspaper, fill out mail order and money order forms, and do some arithmetic.
The class met two hours a night, two nights a week, for some three months. She had seen a large United Nations Declaration of Human Rights poster at Highlander, obtained a copy, and posted it for all in the class to be able to read and understand by the end of the course. The Citizenship Schools succeeded.
Citizenship School teaching materials were collected into booklets, distributed in South Carolina, and later revised to fit voter registration requirements in Tennessee and Georgia.
Guy Carawan, in Highlander "singing schools," improvised lyrics for spirituals and folk songs that urged people to learn to read, write, register, and vote. Citizenship Schools spread to Huntsville, AL, and Savannah, GA, 1960-61, straining resources at Highlander, then in debt and about to be closed by Tennessee authorities.
In August 1961, Highlander handed over its Citizenship School programs to the Martin Luther King-led Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). Septima Clark, who continued working with Citizenship Schools under SCLC, estimated that between 1954-70 they helped some 100,000 blacks learn to read and write.
Highlander Attacked, 1953-61
As Highlander's civil rights activities increased, so too did segregationists' attacks. Fear of communist internal subversion pervaded the U.S. in the 1950s, aggravated by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy's communists-in-government alarmist charges.
Worried by the liberal tide, segregationists mobilized state authority and police to try to roll back the cumulative effects of the May 1954 U.S. Supreme Court Brown desegregation decision; the 1955 Montgomery, AL, bus boycott; the 1957-58 Little Rock, AR, school desegregation crisis; the 1961 black college student lunch counter sit-ins (begun February 1, 1961, Greensboro, NC); and the 1961 white and black freedom bus riders challenging southern segregated public facilities (begun May 4, 1961).
Attacks on Highlander were based on false communist conspiracy charges, going back to the 1930s. Paul Crouch told a Chattanooga reporter that while he was Tennessee Communist Party head, 1939-41, Highlander had 25 Communist Party members.
Crouch had been court martialed in the U.S. Army, served 2 years in the federal prison at Alcatraz, and was a known paid informer for red-baiting groups. In the 1954 U.S. Democratic Senatorial campaign, Pat Sutton, running against Senator Estes Kefauver, cited Paul Crouch's testimony that Highlander's Dombroski and Horton were communists. Sutton lost two-to-one to Kefauver, a friend of Horton's, who avoided mentioning Highlander.
In the spring of 1954, Mississippi Senator James O. Eastland (1904-86), white supremacist planter and Joseph McCarthy imitator, headed the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, investigating "subversive" southern liberal organizations, including Highlander. He believed that a well publicized investigation would help his 1954 Senate reelection. He was also convinced that communists promoted racial equality in order to disrupt and take over the United States government.
Eastland tied Highlander to a conspiracy web that included Virginia Durr (Highlander trustee), sister-in-law of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black and wife of Clifford Judkins Durr (1899-1975), New Deal official, Progressive Party Senate candidate in 1948, and an anti-poll tax activist.
The March 1954 hearings, dealing with alleged communist activities of Highlander's Dombroski, Mrs. Durr, Horton, and others, ended in raucous disorder with Horton physically dragged from the committee room.
The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) revoked Highlander's tax exempt status three times between 1957-71. It was restored on appeal each time. Horton believed this harassment was aimed at stopping Highlander's school integration efforts.
In 1954 the Georgia legislature created a Commission on Education designed to resist school desegregation. The Commission used undercover agents to probe Koinonia Farm, located in Americus, GA, which had jointly sponsored with Highlander integrated children's camps in Tennessee in 1956-57.
On Labor Day weekend, 1957, as Highlander was celebrating its 25th anniversary, Georgia Commission agents photographed Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, Myles Horton, and a publicly acknowledged black communist (who, he later admitted, had conspired with the agents to be in the photo).
In October 1957 the Georgia Commission published a 4-page paper titled "Highlander Folk School: Communist Training School, Monteagle, Tennessee," with photos of Highlander's interracial meetings. The Georgia Commission distributed 250,000 copies, and White Citizens' Councils and the Ku Klux Klan distributed over a million copies by 1959.
Southern newspapers, including the Atlanta Constitution, published articles on Highlander, labeling it at worst communist and at best pro-communist. The photo of Martin Luther King at Highlander was displayed by Mississippi Governor Ross Barnett, printed as a postcard for easy mailing by the John Birch Society, and appeared on 1965 billboards across the South titled, "Martin Luther King at Communist Training School."
When Highlander's fire insurance was canceled in 1957-58, Horton suspected that segregationists were using economic pressure against the school.
Several southern state legislatures formed committees during 1957-59 to investigate causes of racial unrest. An Arkansas committee, headed by the state Attorney General, tied Highlander to the Little Rock disturbances. The Attorney General offered to supply evidence to the Tennessee legislature to help them close Highlander.
On January 26, 1959, the Tennessee legislature appointed a committee to investigate Highlander, using evidence collected by the Georgia Commission on Education.
The charge was that Highlander was integrated, promoted integration, was subversive, promoted communism, allowed free love between the races; that it was not a school approved by state authorities, had no qualified faculty, and awarded no diplomas.
Horton was also charged with operating Highlander for personal profit, because the trustees had given him his house and 76 acres. The last charge--that Highlander sold spirits without a license--followed a July 31, 1959, police raid on Highlander which found beer and a little whisky.
Horton replied to each charge. Yes, Highlander was always integrated, as was implied in its charter. No, Highlander was not subversive but allowed all points of view to be discussed. Communism was disapproved of because it was authoritarian and against Highlander's spirit of open inquiry.
No, Highlander did not condone free love, but in square dancing and folk dancing hands were held and bodies sometimes touched. No, Highlander on principle did not issue diplomas and taught by discussing problems and issues, as did many adult education institutions.
Yes, Highlander did give Horton his house and 76 acres in lieu of over 20 years without salary for himself and Zilphia Horton. Yes, beer was kept at Highlander because nearby cafes would not serve racially mixed groups and a money kitty was kept to replenish drinks.
Tennessee authorities found Highlander guilty of selling beer without a license and guilty of questionable financial practices (citing the gift of Horton's house and land).
Other charges were dropped. The trial sapped Horton's and other Highlander staff's time and energy, yet their programs continued. Appeals delayed the closing of Highlander at Monteagle until August 1961.
By then Horton and legal advisers had obtained a new charter which met Tennessee regulations. A renamed Highlander Research and Education Center began in Knoxville, 1961-71, and still continues at New Market, near Knoxville.
Highlander in Knoxville, 1961-71, was frequently harassed. The City Council, dominated by wealthy grocer Cas Walker, passed an ordinance that all educational institutions be approved by the Council.
Police came with warrants, which Highlander staff ignored, knowing that such legislation was not retroactive and hence not binding. But the Ku Klux Klan marched in front of the school; there were phone threats and crank calls.
Once, in a Maryville, TN, restaurant, Horton and a Highlander lawyer were badly beaten while their horrified wives watched. Horton kept on with his work. The lawyer had to close his office and move to another state.
Myles Horton's Last Years
Horton retired as educational director in 1971; still lived and was a consultant at Highlander; and traveled to talk about the Highlander idea to adult educators in China, the Philippines, India, Malaysia, New Zealand, Australia, and Nicaragua.
He was frequently interviewed, most notably on Bill Moyers' Journal, "Adventures of a Radical Hillbilly," Public Broadcasting System, WGBH, Boston, June 5 and 11, 1981.
Still, he remained obscure to the general public, a minor figure except to those who knew and valued him as a fighter over The Long Haul. Horton chose this title for his 1990 autobiography because as a young man he wanted an all-encompassing task that could not be completed in one lifetime. He found such work at Highlander. He also felt that over the long haul he had sublimated his simmering anger at injustice by fighting a lifelong battle for justice.
Horton died at Highlander on January 19, 1990.
Success or Failure?
Horton had many failures. When requested to do so, he started a Highlander in New Mexico, which failed, and a Highlander in Chicago, which also failed. He later came to see that the Highlander idea fitted third world conditions and succeeded in Appalachia only because Appalachia has third world characteristics of being exploited and largely owned by outside business interests.
He did anticipate two major social movements in which Highlander had some success and made a contribution: unionized labor in the 1930s-40s (Highlander trained early southern CIO leaders); and civil rights in the l950s-60s. Highlander helped train most major and many minor black leaders. Highlander's Citizenship Schools helped enfranchise many black people.
Public schools historically teach what is and so perpetuate the status quo. They follow and seldom lead in reshaping the political, economic, and social class systems.
At Highlander, which was private, small, and committed to clear social uplift goals--Horton taught adult leaders what ought to be and tactics on how to achieve equality. In challenging injustice and trying to reshape social-economic-political forces, Horton was a Social Reconstructionist like George S. Counts, who wrote Dare the School Build a New Social Order?; Harold Rugg, who early wrote social studies textbooks; and Theodore Brameld, defender of a reconstructed education for a reconstructed world.
Horton, who knew and admired both Counts and Brameld, was a revolutionary reformer who found his niche as an adult educator in helping empower oppressed people to fight for justice and a faire