Improperly Dressed (Albert Einstein)

It was not unusual for the great physicist, Albert Einstein, to win medals. What was unusual was for Einstein to wear them.

When awarded two gold medals by the British Royal Society and Royal Astronomical Society, Einstein’s wife Elsa had to repeatedly remind him to pick them up at the Foreign Ministry. When he finally did, they met afterward to go to the movies. Elsa asked him what the medals looked like. Einstein had no idea. He hadn’t even bothered to open the packages.

When Niels Bohr won the American Barnard Medal, awarded every four years to an outstanding scientist, Einstein read about it in a news report, along with a statement that he, Einstein, had been the previous winner. He showed the article to his wife and asked her if it was true. He had forgotten.

“Walther Nernst, amused by Einstein’s reluctance to wear his Pour le Merite medal at a meeting of the Prussian Academy, remarked, ‘I suppose your wife forgot to lay it out for you,’ adding jokingly that Einstein was ‘Improperly dressed!’ ‘No, she didn’t forget,’ he replied. ‘I didn’t want to put it on.'(1)

With Albert Einstein, it was always the work. Never the awards.

(1)Denis Brian, Einstein, a Life (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), p. 155