Einstein On The Strip
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burgeoning empire, “some day, Mr. Prime Minister, you will be able to tax it.”
[So much for a century of progress, in the ruins of the Crystal Palace.] Einstein
was a practical man, not a mere idle dreamer who (lost in clouds of reverie)
wastes precious time and talent on utopian fantasy. That stereotype won’t fit.
Why, he even patented a refrigerator (with Leo Szilard), but it never became
popular, or a household item. However, something he thought of, then stated in
print, did pan out. You may be able to guess what it is, for now it’s an appliance
found all over the world, that owes its origin to research that Einstein carried out
while relativity was percolating. No, it’s not a coffee maker, nor does it dispense
any food, except junk food for thought. Today we call it a television set.
Although the picture tube (kinescope) wasn’t invented until 1925, the physics
that made TV possible in the first place got its start thanks to one of Einstein’s
lesser-known brainstorms, something he did in order to measure or determine
the mass of an electron experimentally by beaming cathode rays at a screen. By
the time Philo T. Farnsworth or Vladimir Zworkyin perfected the device
Einstein had in mind, the question “TV or not TV” was moot.
We all know, or think we do, what his famous formula led to, or was
responsible for, although, like a frontier humorist’s death, reports of Einstein’s
involvement with and his creation of the atomic bomb are greatly exaggerated:
one of many myths that are (almost) as inseparable from the real Einstein (if
there is one) as mass is from energy. We rewind the Manhattan Project, in one
surreally compelling narrative after another. Yet the bottom line is always the
same, no matter which historian is doing the talking. Einstein regretted his minor
role in alerting Franklin Roosevelt to the dangers of Adolf Hitler possessing
nuclear weapons: “had I known that the Germans would not succeed in
producing an atomic bomb, I would not have lifted a finger.” But as sad as
Einstein’s fate was in fathering (or grand-fathering) the Bomb, I believe the
Promethean tragedy of Einstein’s career is much deeper than we have imagined.
Or than the editor of Time (none other than Whittaker Chambers) did when he
put Einstein on the cover for the very first time (July 1, 1946), thus creating the
legend. [A year later, Norman Taurog directed The Beginning or the End?, a
film starring Brian Donlevy as Gen. Leslie Groves and Hume Cronyn as J.
Robert Oppenheimer, with a cameo role for Ludwig Stossel as Einstein himself:
a script (and a fairy tale) that did nothing to challenge the received account.
Einstein grudgingly approved it, but refused to collaborate in the film project,
thereby guaranteeing his mythic status, without lifting a finger to rebut or
correct it.] Soon the legend became hard fact. In 1951, Sam Jaffe portrayed Dr.
Jacob Bamhardt in The Day the Earth Stood Still (dir. Robert Wise), sealing an
image in the wax museum of film imagination. It has remained there ever since,
and has become the one constant amidst change.
Now let’s get back to that other gadget that made media history: the picture
tube. TV or not TV? Either way lies despair: cynicism makes couch potatoes of
us all. The human comedy is tragic and pathetic. Sans Einstein, there’d be no
fallout or deadly radiation emanating from Jeopardy, As the World Turns, CSI,