Hans Albert Einstein: His Life as a Pioneering Engineer

This chapter deals with the early life of Hans Albert Einstein, born on May 14, 1904, in the city of Bern, Switzerland. The apartment where Hans Albert was born is today the Einstein House museum, a memorial to perhaps the greatest scientist of the 20th century. The chapter also talks about the early life of Hans Albert's parents, Mileva and Albert. During these early years of life, Hans Albert developed the interests that were to characterize him through life. Primary here was his love of nature and curiosity about natural processes, passions that were crucial to Albert and were to become so important in Hans Albert's career. Albert challenged Hans Albert to develop his own thinking skills. The sharing of mathematical challenges, and later of professional matters and work, became a habit that Albert and Hans Albert continued through correspondence and personal discussions throughout their lives.

This chapter focuses on Hans Albert's divided family. The family's transition to life without Albert was aided by two of his Zurich friends, Michele Besso and Heinrich Zangger. From Hans Albert's childhood, Albert laid the groundwork for a rare and special father–son commonality: a shared intellectual life, an idea-related intimacy that would become a strong tie, forming a common ground for communication even when family-related issues divided the two. Engineering seemed like a natural choice for Hans Albert. Throughout his life, he was known for his practical nature, for the pleasure he took in the physical manipulation and design of objects, and for his love of hands-on experiences. Hans Albert's choice of an engineering career may also have been one of his life's wisest decisions, crucial for psychological reasons. Having Albert Einstein as a father leaves a son few options.

This chapter discusses the early professional life of Hans Albert Einstein as an engineer. It also highlights Hans Albert's relationships with his parents. In March 1931, he resigned his position with Klönne, and drifted into the new field of hydraulic engineering. Hans Albert started work at Meyer-Peter's lab as an engineering assistant. Meyer-Peter had designed his hydraulics lab to study a range of water engineering problems, such as those arising from Switzerland's growing number of hydropower plants. Hans Albert, exercising his engineering inclinations at home, constructed toys for the boys: blocks, a train set, and an elaborately rigged model sailboat. His father, until he died, regularly assisted Hans Albert with his financial needs and frequently offered him other major gifts as well.

Hans Albert joined Professor Eugen Meyer-Peter's laboratory as an engineering assistant just as the lab was beginning a major project aimed at solving a particularly important river-engineering problem. The engineering problem facing Meyer-Peter required that he deal with two fundamental, but poorly understood, relationships governing river behavior. One concerned the relationship between a river's dimensions and its capacity to convey water. The other concerned the relationship between the rate of water flow and the rate of bed sediment that flowing water can move along a river. Comprehending the complexities he faced, Meyer-Peter carefully chose a prudent method for designing a narrowed Alpine Rhine. Hans Albert's deepening interest in his research led him to form a new view of how flowing water moves bed particles along rivers. This view differed strikingly from the sketchy notions of particle movement described in earlier papers and texts.

When the Einstein family drove to Washington, D.C., to await the processing of Hans Albert's employment papers, the Soil Conservation Service (SCS) was constructing an ambitious field laboratory on the Enoree River about eight miles east of Greenville. The lab was designed to investigate how soil erosion and soil conservation practices affected sediment movement in a river. Hans Albert was appointed as a cooperative agent at the lab. The centerpiece of SCS's Greenville field station was the Enoree Sediment Load Laboratory, which was literally built into the Enoree River. Hans Albert was left largely free to develop the instrumentation needed to obtain and analyze field data on sediment movement in the Enoree and other rivers. While Hans Albert established a professional footing in SCS's Enoree lab, his family had embarked on adjusting to a new landscape and culture.

Hans Albert considered a method that he anticipated engineers and scientists would use for calculating bed-load movement in rivers. To get his bed-load method accepted, Hans Albert wanted to show that it worked for a river. Several streams appeared as suitable candidates for bed-load measurement. Mountain Creek was exactly what Hans Albert wanted—and it appealed to the SCS too—because the creek was typical of hundreds of small streams in South Carolina's Piedmont region. Mountain Creek mimicked large rivers in several ways and possessed most of the characteristics of alluvial channels that Hans Albert sought to understand and formulate. He recorded the discharge of rainwater and sediment. The equipment worked well and the measurements proved, at least to Hans Albert's satisfaction, that the equations derived from his flume at ETH worked well for a small river like Mountain Creek.

When Hans Albert and Frieda arrived in Pasadena, their funds were short and public accommodations were not abundant. Thus, they quickly accepted an invitation to stay temporarily with Hans Albert's new Soil Conservation Service (SCS) colleague, Vito Vanoni, and his wife. In Pasadena, unlike South Carolina, the Einsteins found a culturally diverse community with an abundance of European immigrants. For Hans Albert, Pasadena's main promise had been the prospect of continuing his research in sediment transport. Albert obtained his first SCS position in South Carolina. Hans Albert's official assignment in Pasadena was at the Cooperative Hydraulics Laboratory, operated jointly by Caltech and SCS. Difficulties and disgruntlements aside, Hans Albert was fortunate to have been associated with SCS's lab at Caltech. Firmly convinced that his approach to formulating bed-load transport of sediment was the way to go and should be a research priority, Hans Albert set about extending his approach.

Following the Second World War, Hans Albert's professional prospects brightened because expectations for his Soil Conservation Service (SCS) job shifted squarely back toward sediment transport research. In 1947, Hans Albert gained national prominence when he investigated sediment problems of the Rio Grande River and presented his work at a major conference convened by several U.S. federal agencies. Hans Albert's bed-load method demonstrated reasonable success when applied to small streams like Mountain Creek and West Goose Creek. Hans Albert submitted the progress report on his Rio Grande project on July 29, his last day of work at Caltech, and then packed his stacks of Rio Grande maps, notebooks, and data into boxes to take along to Berkeley. In 1947, Hans Albert Einstein joined the faculty of the Division of Mechanical Engineering in the University of California Berkeley's Department of Engineering.

Landing a faculty position at Berkeley catapulted Hans Albert's professional advancement. The university boasted one of the leading hydraulics programs in the country, and its visibility and reputation were growing. As a professor, Hans Albert's teaching contract gave him plenty of time for consulting and travel. He worked closely with the laboratory engineer to design the new hydraulics laboratory and its equipment for studying various fundamental aspects of water flow, sediment movement, hydraulic structures, and waves. During the first few years that Hans Albert was in Berkeley, he spent much time compiling his method for calculating bed-sediment transport in rivers and other alluvial channels into a single scholarly report. With time, Hans Albert spread his concepts of sediment transport across the United States and around the world. The spread of his influence was accomplished, in part, through the classes he taught at Berkeley.

Hans Albert's membership on the Missouri River Division's River Sedimentation Board brought him to Nebraska and North Dakota two or three times a year for meetings aimed at tackling the river's sediment problems. Moreover, it enabled him to develop a close professional relationship with Don Bondurant, Chief of the Division's Sedimentation Section. Bondurant and Hans became firm professional friends, collaborating extensively on the Missouri and other river projects. Corps engineer Fred Toffaleti had used the Einstein method to estimate the amount of sediment the Atchafalaya's erosive flow could convey and thereby assessed an eventual equilibrium bed profile. In the summer of 1954, Hans Albert spent several months assisting the Corps with yet another major river sediment problem. Hans Albert's reputation as the river sediment expert was now established on paper as well as in the field.

During Hans Albert's busy early years at Berkeley, where his efforts as a consultant were multiplied by activities as a new faculty member, correspondence with his father was regular but not frequent. With his first doctoral student, El-Sayed Ahmed El-Samni, Hans Albert took advantage of the major advances in instrumentation since his own days as a graduate student and conducted a series of laboratory studies examining how water flow forces cause bed particles to move in an apparently probabilistic manner related to fluctuating hydrodynamic lift force exerted by water flow. During the period 1949 to 1951, Hans Albert undertook research on flow resistance with Berkeley doctoral student Robert Banks. Over the period 1950–1951, graduate student Ning Chien and Hans Albert carried out flume experiments. Throughout this period, the pleasure of sharing work-related ideas remained a strong bond between father and son.

In 1964, Hans Albert participated in a historic panel discussion, organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers to discuss the current state of knowledge regarding channel design and to define the needs for better design practice. In addition to his attraction for sailing, Hans Albert viewed the San Francisco Bay as an arena of water and sediment movement. He was engaged by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' San Francisco District for help with the sediment problems it was facing in the bay. Hans Albert was also involved in a project on modeling water movement in the entire San Francisco Bay. Berkeley's efforts in coastal and harbor engineering drew Hans Albert into yet another field of sediment transport that occurring in pipelines such as those used by dredges removing sediment from harbors and navigation channels.

Throughout the 1950s, Hans Albert's intense professional life absorbed his time. He liked his consulting jobs, working in the laboratory, and lecturing, especially presenting invited lectures on sediment transport by rivers. He felt at home in Berkeley and enjoyed the relatively unfettered life of a successful professor able to follow his research interests. In 1958, he and Frieda agreed to travel to Israel to dedicate the Albert Einstein Physics Institute at the Technion—Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. Hans Albert married Elizabeth Roboz a scant eight months after Frieda's death. Their lives together emphasized their careers and academic interests. Most of Hans Albert's Berkeley teaching centered on a fairly standard set of undergraduate and graduate courses in fluid mechanics and hydraulics, with an emphasis on sediment transport and river engineering. As the years progressed, his lectures became ever more enriched by his experiences as a practicing engineer around the world.

Hans Albert retired from his Berkeley professorship in July 1971 at the age of 67. Post-retirement, the primary focus of his professional activities shifted to delivering invited lectures and consulting. Freed from his formal classroom ties at Berkeley and thus able to exercise his love of travel, he frequently lectured elsewhere. Hans Albert continued his professional writing, adding the production of several book chapters to his usual contributions to journals and conference proceedings. He also was starting to work on a sedimentation text for engineers with his colleague and friend of many years, Donald Bondurant. In June 1973, he died of a massive heart attack while on a trip to Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts. Hans Albert was buried in a small Woods Hole churchyard overlooking Vineyard Sound, where ocean currents rhythmically washed and sifted the sediments that he had studied for a lifetime.

In their readable 1938 book, The Evolution of Physics, Albert Einstein and Leopold Infeld devoted a chapter to what they called “The Rise of the Mechanical View,” the application of classical physics (often simply called mechanics) to explain and formulate the motion of bodies from sediment particles to planets. This mechanical view, at the heart of contemporary scientific and engineering thinking, guided Hans Albert Einstein's approach to understanding and formulating sediment transport by flowing water in rivers. It enabled him to make substantial technical contributions over about three decades. He became recognized as the world's foremost expert on sediment problems in rivers, extensively advising engineers coping with river-sediment problems in the United States and abroad. Hans Albert's contributions were important because rivers, large and small, play vital roles in the economy of many regions. Hans Albert Einstein's formulations of bed-sediment transport and of flow depth were innovative and insightful.