Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 2,166
By This is the grave of Hans Albert Einstein.
Born in 1904 in Bern, Switzerland, Einstein was, well, the son of Albert Einstein. Now, I did not visit this cemetery looking for Einstein’s kid. But when I saw this grave and figured out that it was indeed Einstein’s kid, I thought, man, what must it have been like to be the son of Albert Einstein, arguably the smartest and most famous man in the world for most of your life? I can’t even imagine. And his mother was no slouch either–Mileva Marić was Einstein’s student and then his wife and she was an important mathematician in her own right. Easily worth a grave post just to speculate on the question of being the child of super famous geniuses with expectations like Albert Einstein would have with his son.
The Einsteins divorced in 1919 but by then young Hans was already a budding engineering student in his own right. He went to ETH Zurich in 1922 and became a civil engineer, then worked at Klonne, a steel design firm, in Germany, before going back to Switzerland, where he spent most of the 30s. Now, by this time, the Nazis were rising and Albert had already gone to the U.S. He urged his son to leave Switzerland for the U.S., saying it wasn’t safe enough for him. Of course, most Jews could not emigrate to the United States because the United States was an anti-Semitic cesspool as well and when confronted with a boatload of Jewish children refugees seeking to not die by entering the U.S., Congress, said, nope, go back and die. But the Einsteins had money and education and could contribute to high-end activities in the U.S., so Hans got in.
Einstein Jr. wasn’t a particularly interesting guy really. He was a good engineer who contributed significantly to some minor American issues. He took a job with the Department of Agriculture in South Carolina, working on sediment transport. In 1947, he got a job as a professor of hydraulic engineering at Berkeley. He stayed there the rest of his career. He was quite well-liked and received a lot of awards. He was a good engineer and, at least according to his gravestone, a good teacher. Though that may be according to himself and I will say this about teaching–I would never tell other people I am some great teacher because I think you have to ask your students that. We are all self-deluded when it comes to teaching. Everyone thinks they are a good teacher. That’s obviously not accurate with a lot of people. I think I’m a pretty OK teacher–I bring a lot of energy, that’s for sure. But I dunno, I think the students themselves are the only ones who can really evaluate that and I don’t think that course evaluations at the end of a semester–which are inherently sexist and racist as well as studies have found–are any use in determining that either. I think it probably takes a lot of time for students to really understand who the good teachers were. But I digress.
Einstein married twice. His second wife was Elizabeth Roboz, who was a huge figure in the field of neurochemistry and who did critical early research on multiple sclerosis. They married in 1959. But she is not buried with him. If this was about who I would have seen intentionally, it would have been her and so I wanted to at least mention her. Einstein was a big enough deal in the civil engineering world that the American Society of Civil Engineers has an award named for him to honor him “for his outstanding contributions to the engineering profession and his advancements in the areas of erosion control, sedimentation and alluvial waterways.”
Anyway, Einstein was in Woods Hole, Massachusetts in 1973 attending a symposium. He had a heart attack and died. He was 69 years old.
Hans Albert Einstein is buried in Woods Hole Village Cemetery, Woods Hole, Massachusetts. I’m not sure why he was buried where he died instead of back at his home in Berkeley. But it’s a nice place.
If you would like this series to visit other civil engineers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Charles Storer Storrow, who designed the dam and canal complex to run the giant factories of Lawrence, Massachusetts, is in Cambridge. Mansfield Merriman, who was a big time hydraulics engineer in the early 20th century, is in Yonkers, New York. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.