The Albert Einstein House, Princeton, New Jersey

Albert Einstein — widely considered the greatest physicist of all time, and Time magazine's Person of the Century in 1999 — spent his last two decades in Princeton, New Jersey. His home at 112 Mercer Street is a National Historic Landmark.

His life

• Born to Jewish parents in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, he is best known for the theory of relativity and its mass–energy equivalence, E = mc² — but was also an international advocate of peace, human rights and, early on, a homeland for the Jewish people.
• In 1880 his father, owner of a small electrical appliance factory, moved the family to Munich; financial trouble took them to Italy in 1894. Einstein studied at the Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich.
• While working in a patent office, he earned his Ph.D. in 1905 — the same year his paper "On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies" introduced special relativity, a theory of space-time resting on two postulates: the laws of physics are the same for all observers moving uniformly relative to each other, and the speed of light in a vacuum is the same for all observers, however they or the light source move.
• In 1909 he began teaching at the Polytechnic School; a year later he went to the German University in Prague for two years, then returned to Zurich as a full professor.
• By 1914 he was internationally known and became director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin, resuming German citizenship and staying 19 years.
• In May 1919, a team led by British astronomer Arthur Eddington photographed a solar eclipse and claimed to confirm Einstein's prediction that the Sun bends starlight. Headlines declared Newtonian physics overthrown, and Einstein, who shunned publicity, became a celebrity. Eddington's instruments were later shown unable to measure the effect accurately, but later tests confirmed the theory. That year he married Elsa Löwenthal; his first marriage, to mathematician Mileva Marić, had ended in divorce, and they had three children.
• He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921 and pursued a unified field theory uniting all fundamental forces and particle interactions.
• As Hitler's party rose to power amid Germany's postwar turmoil and depression, with its antisemitism and contempt for democracy, Einstein emigrated to the United States (first visited in 1921) to join the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He hoped for a quiet life of research, but fame kept him traveling. He helped refugees fleeing Nazi Germany and lent his name and energy to the Allied cause in World War II.
• He retired in 1945 but kept living and working in Princeton until his death on April 18, 1955. He is often ranked alongside Isaac Newton as a figure who changed the course of physics.

The house

112 Mercer Street is a simple two-story, L-shaped frame house, with a gabled roof over the front and a flat roof over the rear. Its builder and exact date are unknown; it was probably built in the 1870s or 1880s.

• Einstein first lived at 2 Library Place after arriving in 1933, then bought 112 Mercer Street in 1936; it was his home until he died.
• The house was central to his American work. His biographer Ronald Clark described his Institute office and his Mercer Street study as his natural habitats — where he could best pursue his work and his long, stubborn resistance to the new directions in physics he himself had helped launch decades earlier.
• In April 1955, shortly before his death, Einstein reportedly asked his stepdaughter Margot not to turn the house into a museum, and she honored the request.
• It was designated a National Historic Landmark on January 7, 1976 — but, respecting Einstein's wishes, the Park Service didn't publicize it at the time.

The house is a private residence and can be viewed from the street.

Sources

Based on "New Jersey: Albert Einstein House," National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.