József Illy

https://www.academia.edu/18222950/Review_of_J%C3%B3zsef_Illy_The_Practical_Einst...

JÓZSEF ILLY, The Practical Einstein: Experiments, Patents, Inventions. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 202. ISBN 978-1-4214-0457-8. £31.00 (hardback).
doi:10.1017/S0007087414000302

Albert Einstein’s practical side has usually been overshadowed by his other contributions to science. Some of his inventions and technological ideas have received scholarly attention, but usually by specialists in those technologies, such as refrigeration and aeronautics. This book, though, helps to redress the balance for a wide range of readers.

József Illy has not only explored Einstein’s published Collected Papers, which cover his work up to 1922, but also combed through subsequent correspondence, publications and ephemera at the Einstein archive in Jerusalem. The result is a light-touch treatment that surveys his musings, his experiments, his expert judgements and his inventions.

The diverse examples of Einstein’s interests suggest qualities that are not typically part of his mythos. First, Einstein was not a chance technologist owing to the accident of a father and uncle in the electrical-engineering business, or a lucky break in gaining a secure job as a patent clerk. As the author observes, Einstein had a lifelong interest in ‘direct contact with experience’ (p. 2), although he never considered a career in technology. By 1904 – a year after his Wunderjahr with papers on special relativity, the photoelectric effect and Brownian motion – he was deemed by his employers capable of handling the most difficult technical patent applications. And, periodically over the rest of his life, he recalled that period as his favourite, enjoying competence at his job yet free to think about scientific questions that interested him without the pressure to ‘lay golden eggs’ (p. 5) that later weighed on him. Einstein remained at the patent office until 1909 and, more tellingly, served periodically as an expert assessor and consultant on patents and designs over the rest of his life.
Illy tracks part of Einstein’s popular acclaim to his ability to offer quotable assessments of new inventions for news stories, owing to his familiarity with current research and patent applications.

But not all of his technological musings and experimental ideas (which he dubbed ‘escapades' and ‘detours’ (p. 5)) made an impact or set precedents. Some, like a 1926 explanation for the meandering of rivers, were soon forgotten or scarcely cited. Others, such as a 1912 proposal for an ether-detection test founded on a torsion pendulum experiment, had been tried with a null result
over two decades earlier.

As such dates suggest, Einstein intermingled this work with his better-known activities. Between 1914 and 1922, encompassing the period during which he completed work on general relativity and then achieved celebrity following the eclipse observations of Arthur Eddington, Einstein served as an expert critic on a long-running patent dispute concerning gyrocompasses. From 1921 he was a well-paid consultant for a German manufacturer of electric hammers. The stream of technical opinions and patent judgements continued through the 1930s, and intermingled with carefully considered inventions that he frequently pursued with contemporaries including Leó Szilárd, Rudolph Goldschmidt and Gustav Bucky. The range of inventions – from air foils to hearing aids to waterproof clothing – is as varied as that of the most prolific inventors. It would have been equally interesting to know what fraction of these received patents and were introduced commercially with market success. The results, akin to the ‘key performance indicators’ that burden academics today, might provide a sense of Einstein’s creative success as productive inventor. It would have been interesting to have further analysis, too, of how important and regular these practical activities were to his varied life.

There are a very few unclear translations, such as ‘nitrogen acid’ (p. 37), and a description of an electric piano strummed at ‘the eigenfrequency of the wire or its multiples’ (p. 58), for which a more familiar description might be its ‘resonant frequency and harmonics’. This short but well-documented book is not a radical evaluation, but an engaging one. It suggests a more human and more ‘hands-on’ Einstein than the popular myth, and perhaps a better role model: his career of mixed productivity, eclectic interests, consulting work and brief enthusiasms may be recognizable to more than a few contemporary scientists.… (meer)