The day Albert Einstein died was, obviously, huge news. Journalists and photographers rushed to Princeton hospital, all looking to get a scoop but there was one photojournalist who succeeded above the others by going a different direction.
Life magazine staff photographer Ralph Morse managed to get into Einstein’s office — bribing the building’s superintendent with scotch whisky — and took a poignant photo showing Einstein’s cluttered desk looking as if the great scientist had just stepped away.
“Einstein died at the Princeton Hospital,” Morse explained in a 2014 interview with Life. “So I headed there first. But it was chaos journalists, photographers, onlookers. So I headed over to Einstein’s office at the Institute for Advanced Studies. On the way, I stopped and bought a case of scotch. I knew people might be reluctant to talk, but most people are happy to accept a bottle of booze, instead of money, in exchange for their help. So I get to the building, find the superintendent, give him a fifth of scotch, and like that, he opens up the office.”
Morse’s quick, ingenious thinking enabled him to capture a photograph that echoes through the ages. Case in point, a recent viral Reddit post of the photo received over 60,000 upvotes.
The below excerpt from Life magazine describes Morse’s shot.
The empty chair by the formula-filled blackboard looked as if the scholar who usually sat in it had merely stepped away, perhaps to gaze reflectively at the meadow that rolls past the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study. But the chair would not again be filled. Last week the entire world went into mourning for the greatest scientific thinker of his age. . . . For 50 years the world had been heaping honors on him, but Einstein remained indifferent to worldly glory. Dressing in baggy old clothes, he shut himself away in lonely contemplation of the massive intellectual problems he alone could solve. But he emerged to champion the ideals he cherished: justice, freedom, peace. He believed in his own form of ‘cosmic’ religion. ‘I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil,’ he said. ‘The presence of a superior reasoning power, revealed in the incomprehensible universe, forms my idea of God.’
The Photo Wasn’t Released for 55 Years
Despite the above excerpt from Life describing Morse’s photo, it was never printed in the magazine. Morse was certain that he had obtained an exclusive photograph and would be feted by his editors — but he was shocked when told they wouldn’t run the photo.
“I get to New York with the film, and there are signs all over the place in the office: ‘Ralph, see Ed!’ Ed Thompson was Life’s managing editor,” Morse, who passed away in 2014, explained.
“Ed says, ‘Ralph, I hear you have one hell of an exclusive.’ I say, ‘Yeah, I think I do.’ And he says, ‘Well, we’re not going to run it.’ I was stunned.
“Turns out Einstein’s son, Hans, called while I was on the road to New York, and asked that we not run the story, that we respect the family’s privacy. So Ed decided to kill the story. You can’t run a magazine without an editor to make those decisions, and Ed had made his. So I thought, ‘Well, that’s that,’ and went on to my next assignment. I figured the pictures would never see the light of day, and forgot all about them.”
Einstein died on April 17, 1955, but Morse’s incredible photo didn’t see the light of day until the new century.
Image credits: Ralph Morse/Life Pictures/Shutterstock