Hans Albert Einstein

Hans Albert Einstein (/aɪnˈstaɪn, -ˈʃtaɪn/ eyen-STYNE, -⁠SHTYNE; May 14, 1904 – July 26, 1973) was a Swiss-American engineer and educator, the second child and first son of Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić. Hans A. Einstein was a long-time professor of Hydraulic Engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

Einstein was widely recognized for his research on sediment transport. To honor his outstanding achievement in hydraulic engineering, the American Society of Civil Engineers established the "Hans Albert Einstein Award" in 1988 and the annual award is given to those who have made significant contributions to the field.

Early life

Hans Albert Einstein was born on May 14, 1904 in Bern, Switzerland, where his father, Albert Einstein, worked as a clerk in the patent office. His father was of German-Jewish descent and his mother, Mileva Marić, Serbian-Orthodox. His younger brother, Eduard Einstein, was born in 1910 and died in 1965. The fate of his older sister, Lieserl Einstein, Albert Einstein's and Mileva Marić's first child, is unknown. Their parents divorced in 1919 after living apart for five years.

Career

Einstein followed his mother's and father's footsteps and studied at ETH, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, in Zurich, Switzerland. In 1926 he was awarded a diploma in civil engineering. From 1926 to 1930 he worked as a steel designer on a bridge project in Dortmund. In 1936 Hans Albert obtained the doctor of technical science degree. His doctoral thesis "Bed Load Transport as a Probability Problem" is considered the definitive work on sediment transport.

Einstein's father, Albert, left Germany in 1933 to escape the virulently antisemitic Nazi threat. Heeding his father's advice, Einstein emigrated from Switzerland to Greenville, South Carolina, in 1938. He worked for the US Department of Agriculture, studying sediment transport from 1938 to 1943. He continued working for the USDA at the California Institute of Technology starting in 1943. In 1947 he took a position as associate professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He advanced to full professor, and later professor emeritus. Einstein traveled the world to participate in hydraulic engineering conferences. He was at a symposium at Woods Hole in Massachusetts when he collapsed and died from heart failure on July 26, 1973.

Einstein was honored by a Guggenheim Fellowship (1953), research awards from the American Society of Civil Engineers (1959 and 1960), the Berkeley Citation from the University of California (1971), the Certificate of Merit from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (1971), and a certificate of recognition for more than 20 years of devoted and distinguished service to Applied Mechanics Reviews by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (1972).

His papers are held at the Water Resources Collections and Archives in the University of California, Riverside Libraries and in the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives.

Personal life

In 1927 Hans Albert Einstein married Frieda Knecht. Albert disapproved of Frieda much as his parents had of Mileva. Einstein and Frieda had four children:

• Bernhard Caesar Einstein (10 July 1930 – 30 September 2008), who was a physicist and engineer.
• Klaus Martin Einstein (1932–1939), died of diphtheria aged six.
• David Einstein (October–November 1939), died aged one month.
• Evelyn Einstein (28 March 1941 – 13 April 2011), adopted.

Frieda died in 1958, and Hans Albert later married neurochemist Elizabeth Roboz (1904–1995).

Einstein was an avid sailor, frequently taking colleagues and family out for excursions on the San Francisco Bay. On his many field trips and academic excursions, he took thousands of pictures, many of which he developed himself and presented as slide shows. He also loved music, as denoted on his gravestone, and he played flute and piano.

Death

Hans Albert Einstein died due to heart failure on July 26, 1973 (aged 69) in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, U.S.