New Einstein letters to go online at ETH
The Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) is to post six new letters from physicist Albert Einstein on its library’s website.
The letters, which have been bequeathed to the ETHZ, were sent by Einstein to his university friend Jakob Ehrat and Ehrat’s mother Emma in the early 1900s.
A letter to Emma Ehrat-Ühlinger in 1903 reveals that she had been upset by Einstein’s phrase “regards to your old lady”. In it he explains that the proper and official title for the mother of an academic was “the man’s old lady”.
He told her that he’d used the same greeting in many letters to his own mother.
The ETHZ said that the contents of the other five letters to his friend were also of a personal nature and showed that their friendship continued for a long time after their spell at university together.
More than 100 letters and documents from various stages of Einstein’s life are available in the library’s online collection.
The originals, many of which were written in the old German Sütterlin script, are only brought out for promotional purposes nowadays.
Between 1902 and 1909, Einstein worked at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern in a job that allowed him time for his scientific work. In 1905 he produced five groundbreaking papers on theoretical physics.
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