The letter is addressed to the 32nd President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt.
A two-page letter from Albert Einstein that warned Franklin Roosevelt, then President USA, that Nazi Germany could use nuclear research to create an atomic bomb, will be auctioned at Christie's in September with an estimated value of $4 million.
The Guardian reports this.
Einstein's letter – one of two the theoretical physicist wrote in a house on the north shore of New York's Long Island with colleague Leo Szilard – warned that the German government was actively supporting nuclear research and could create “extremely powerful bombs” like those eventually deployed by the United States at the end of World War II.
He called on the US government to do the same. In response, Roosevelt created a committee that became the precursor to the Manhattan Project, led by Robert Oppenheimer, which created the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, ending World War II and ushering in the nuclear age.
The letter that Einstein sent to the President is kept in the Roosevelt Library and Museum in Hyde Park in New York. But a second version—autographed and slightly shorter—is being auctioned off by the estate of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. Christie's auction for $1.6 billion, as well as almost everything related to Jimi Hendrix, purchased the letter from publisher and independent presidential candidate Malcolm Forbes in 2002 for $2.1 million. The Wall Street Journal reported, that it was the first historical document of the 20th century, the cost of which exceeded a million dollars.
Christie's auction has a history with Einstein memorabilia. He previously sold the physicist's so-called “Letter to God,” in which he wrote that “the word 'God' is to him nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness,” for nearly $3 million in 2018.
But the letter is unlikely to break the $13 million record set in 2021 for one of the few surviving records detailing his theory of general relativity.
The auction house expects that the visual art market, which is under stress, may attract buyers to historical artifacts, especially amid current concerns about a new trilateral nuclear arms race between the US, Russia and China, as well as – success of last year's Oscar-winning Oppenheimer biopic. the most important documents in the history of the 20th century, and that this is not something that you just hang up in your office.” According to him, Allen carefully kept the letter away from sunlight.
The letter, dated August 2, 1939, less than a month before Germany invaded Poland, begins: “Sir, recent work in nuclear physics has made it probable that uranium may be converted into a new and important source energy.” In a letter sent to Roosevelt, Einstein wrote: “It may be possible to establish a nuclear chain reaction in a large mass of uranium… and this new phenomenon will also lead to the creation of bombs.”
Recall that the first illustration of the book about Harry Potter was sold at auction for a fabulous sum. The author of the illustration, Thomas Taylor, was only 23 years old when, in 1997, he first visualized the main character of JK Rowling's cult books.
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