Hans Albert Einstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Hans Albert Einstein was born on the 14th of May 1904 in Bern, Switzerland, in the shadow of a name that would follow him everywhere. His father worked as a clerk at the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property that year, far from the fame that would soon consume him. Hans Albert grew up to become not a physicist, but a hydraulic engineer. He spent his career studying how rivers carry sediment, and the work he produced would earn him fellowships, awards, and a named prize that outlasted him by decades. What drove a man raised in the orbit of one of history's most celebrated scientists to wade into riverbeds and calculate the movement of gravel? And what kind of life does a person build when their last name means something entirely different to the rest of the world than it does to them?

• 2. A Family Under Pressure

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  The household Hans Albert grew up in was marked by fracture as much as brilliance. His mother, Mileva Maric, was Serbian; his father, Albert Einstein, was of German-Jewish descent. The couple had a daughter, Lieserl, before Hans Albert was born, but her fate remains unknown. It has been suggested she died of scarlet fever in 1903. Hans Albert's younger brother, Eduard, arrived in 1910. In 1913, Hans and Eduard were baptized as Orthodox Christians at the Orthodox Church of Saint Nicholas in Novi Sad. Their parents separated and eventually divorced in 1919, after living apart for five years. Eduard Einstein went on to live a troubled life and died in 1965. The family Hans Albert came from was shaped by religious crossings, national borders, and a parents' marriage that did not survive the early years of the twentieth century.

• 3. The Engineer's Path

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  In 1922, Hans Albert entered ETH Zurich, the same institution his parents had attended before him. He studied civil engineering and graduated in 1926. His first job took him to Dortmund, Germany, where he worked at the steel design company Klonne from 1926 to 1930. He then returned to ETH Zurich to work as a research engineer at the newly founded Laboratory of Hydraulics and Soil Mechanics, known as VAWE, from 1931 to 1938. It was there, in 1936, that he earned his doctorate in technical science. His thesis, titled "Bed Load Transport as a Probability Problem," addressed how sediment moves along riverbeds. It is considered the definitive work in the field of sediment transport. By framing the movement of gravel and silt as a probability problem, Hans Albert brought a mathematical precision to something that rivers had been doing for millions of years without anyone fully explaining.

• 4. Crossing the Atlantic

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  Albert Einstein left Germany in 1933 to escape Nazi persecution of Jews. His advice to his son carried weight: Hans Albert emigrated from Switzerland to Greenville, South Carolina in 1938. He took a position with the US Department of Agriculture, continuing his research on sediment transport from 1938 to 1943. He then moved to the California Institute of Technology, still working for the USDA, starting in 1943. Four years later, in 1947, he was appointed associate professor of hydraulic engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. He rose to full professor and eventually professor emeritus, and he held his position at Berkeley until 1971. His career there spanned a quarter century, and he traveled internationally to attend hydraulic engineering conferences throughout those years.

• 5. Recognition and Legacy

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  A Guggenheim Fellowship came to Hans Albert in 1953, recognizing the scope and quality of his research. The American Society of Civil Engineers gave him research awards in both 1959 and 1960. In 1971, the University of California honored him with the Berkeley Citation, and the US Department of Agriculture awarded him a Certificate of Merit the same year. The American Society of Mechanical Engineers recognized him in 1972 for more than twenty years of devoted service to Applied Mechanics Reviews. He was made a member of Pi Tau Sigma with honorary membership grade in December 1949. In 1958, he was the principal guest of honor at the Technion when a new building housing the Albert Einstein Institute of Physics was dedicated. After his death, the American Society of Civil Engineers established the Hans Albert Einstein Award in 1988; it is given annually to those who have made significant contributions to hydraulic engineering.

• 6. The Man Beyond the Work

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  Hans Albert married Frieda Knecht in 1927. They had four children together, though not all survived. Klaus Martin Einstein was born in 1932 and died of diphtheria at age six in 1939. David Einstein was born in October 1939 and died just one month later. Their son Bernhard Caesar Einstein, born on the 10th of July 1930, became a physicist and engineer, and lived until the 30th of September 2008. Their adopted daughter, Evelyn Einstein, was born on the 28th of March 1941 and died on the 13th of April 2011. Frieda Knecht died in 1958, and Hans Albert married neurochemist Elizabeth Roboz the following year. Outside his professional life, he was an avid sailor who regularly took colleagues and family out on the San Francisco Bay. He photographed extensively on field trips and academic excursions, developing many of the pictures himself and presenting them as slide shows. His gravestone notes his love of music; he played both flute and piano.

• 7. A Final Symposium

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  Hans Albert Einstein collapsed and died of heart failure on the 26th of July 1973 while attending a symposium at Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He died, appropriately, in the middle of a gathering of fellow scientists. His papers were preserved in two collections: the Water Resources Collections and Archives at the University of California, Riverside Libraries, and the University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections and Archives. The Hans Albert Einstein Award, which the American Society of Civil Engineers created fifteen years after his death, continues to be given each year, carrying his name into a field he spent his career building.