Albert Einstein always appeared to be some kind of quirky mad scientist whenever he was portrayed in movies and media. Whoever he was, he must have been something special to be able to sell a signed photograph of himself (with his tongue out) for more than $74,000. It hadn’t even occurred to me that he met many of the people I admire from the same era (Charlie Chaplin, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris better known as Le Corbusier). Before long, I had spent my whole day reading about him.

Einstein sitting on the front steps of his home in Princeton, wearing his fuzzy slippers. Photography by Gillett Griffin.

Today’s Designer of the Week is Albert Einstein, not for his famous E=MC² but for his collaborative work with Leó Szilárd, a Hungarian-American physicist and inventor known for his patented nuclear reactor concept. The two worked together to develop what is commonly known as the Einstein-Szilard or Einstein Refrigerator. The Einstein Refrigerator was developed in 1926 and operates at constant pressure while requiring only a heat source to operate. This was in response to an increased rate of deaths due to poisonous gas leaks from refrigerators.

Although the design was a huge improvement on the older refrigerators, the introduction of the much safer ‘freon’ refrigerant is more commonly found today. However, since 2008, the Einstein Refrigerator has been modified to develop more environmentally friendly refrigeration prototypes. Cambridge University is actually exploring cooling via magnetic fields:

[Our refrigeration prototype] works in a similar way (to freon fridges). […] When the magnetic field is next to the alloy, it’s like compressing the gas, and when the magnetic field leaves, it’s like expanding the gas. – Neil Wilson, project manager.

After hours of flicking through articles, the most interesting I found does not relate to any particular design development but rather to the designers who met Einstein. The article titled Albert Einstein, Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and the Future of the American City by Milton Cameron and published by the Institute for Advanced Study in 2014, details the interesting relationships between Einstein and the two famous architects accompanied by images of Einstein within Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Fallingwater, and along side Le Corbusier after a discussion of his concept for Le Modulor:

[Le Modular] is a new language of proportions which expresses the good easily and the bad with complications. – Albert Einstein

Overall, Einstein was an exceptional human being and like many people he knew what architecture he liked and what he wanted to sit on every day. In spite of this, he provided minor support to many architects and designers, he did this because he valued artistic freedom:

Everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom – Albert Einstein