Notable Americans: At Albert Einstein's death on April 18th, 1955 in Princeton, NJ he was considered the world's most preeminent physicist. Life Magazine was allowed access to his office a mere hours after he died at a Princeton hospital and took a series of photos of his desk and personal belongings just as he had left them. He had gone to the hospital with an unfinished draft for a speech he was to give the next evening on television commemorating the State of Israel's seventh anniversary. At his funeral Robert Oppenheimer, the head of the Manhattan Project that developed the Atomic bomb, spoke at his memorial service and had this to say about the 1921 Nobel Prize winner: "[...] He was almost wholly without sophistication and wholly without worldliness ... There was always with him a wonderful purity at once childlike and profoundly stubborn." He was 76 when he died of an abdominal aortic aneurysm. |
| Albert Einstein's office desk just as he left it at his Princeton office the day he died a few hours earlier. It included his pipe and a photograph. |
