Owning an important piece of history is made possible by great auction houses. Christie’s is offering a $4 million chance to a collector for a two-page letter written by Albert Einstein. In this imperative letter, the German-born theoretical physicist warns Franklin D. Roosevelt—then president of the United States—of the unstoppable Nazi Germany’s nuclear research plans involving an atomic bomb. The letter, written by one of the greatest and most influential scientists of all time in a cabin on Long Island with a fellow scientist, Leo Szilard, threw light on the German government’s extremely powerful bombs. It was this letter that led to the creation of a committee, the J. Robert Oppenheimer-headed Manhattan Project.
The letter sent to the president is at the Roosevelt Library and Museum in New York. Christie’s will auction the second shorter version, pencil-signed by the father of the theory of general relativity about space and time. It is being sold off by the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who purchased the letter from Malcolm Forbes in 2002 for $2.1m. In 2018, Christie’s amassed a whopping $2.8 million for the genius’s “God Letter,” setting a world record at the New York auction. The letter that will be auctioned dated 2 August 1939, and gets straight to the point, “Sir: Recent work in nuclear physics made it probable that uranium may be turned into a new and important source of energy.”
It remains to be seen whether the September auction will break the record of the God Letter. But there is no denying there are high chances of it surpassing previous records, especially after the success of “Oppenheimer,” which was based on the incident. This piece of priceless advice is going up for sale at Christie’s in September in one of three sales comprising Allen’s collection of scientific and technological pieces, which has an estimated value of $4m.
