The Tesla Memorial Society of New York has campaigned for many years for recognition of the part Mileva Marić played in Relativity and Einstein’s Annus Mirabilis of 1905. See www.teslasociety.com/Mileva.htm.
Albert Einstein married Mileva Marić in a Berne registry office in January 1903 when their daughter Lieserl was a year old. By 1912 Einstein had become contemptuous and rude towards Mileva. He demanded a divorce. Mileva refused. In 1919, Einstein gained her consent to a divorce by promising her the money from the Nobel Prize it was widely anticipated he would win. Einstein immediately married his cousin Elsa. The Nobel Prize came in 1921 ‘for his services to Theoretical Physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect’. In return for financial support, Einstein seems to have stipulated that Mileva would never discuss their past scientific work with anyone, otherwise financial support would cease. Mileva put most of the money she received from Albert towards bringing up their two sons, Hans Albert and Eduard, especially after Eduard developed severe schizophrenia as a young adult and needed extensive hospitalisation for the rest of his life. In later years exchanges between Albert and Mileva grew more cordial. She died in Zurich in 1948. Einstein died in New Jersey seven years later. In 2005 Mileva Marić was honoured in Zurich by the ETH (the former Zurich Polytechnikum).
Zorka Marićbegan in real life increasingly to live up to the description ‘loony’. Her father hid a large amount of money in an abandoned wood-stove in the back-garden. One day, when no-one was around, Zorka started a fire in the stove and the money was lost in its entirety.
Dr. Johann Büttikofer did exist and he did get an Honorary degree from Berne for discovering in the Liberian interior the first complete pygmy hippopotamus specimens known to science. He donated them to the Natural History Museum of Leiden.
Lieserl’s grave-site has never been found. The author Tim Symonds believes she was buried secretly under the porch of one of the former Marić family homes as portrayed in his novel the Mystery of Einstein’s Daughter.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Naval Treaty’, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1894). Episode XXIII in the Strand Magazine, ‘The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, the case took place in 1893. Dr. Watson refers a letter to Holmes from an old schoolmate, now a Foreign Office employee from Woking, who has had an important naval treaty stolen from his office.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Five Orange Pips’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1892). Episode V in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, it appeared in November 1891. Conan Doyle later ranked the story seventh in a list of his twelve favourite Sherlock Holmes stories. A young Sussex gentleman named John Openshaw has a strange story: in 1869 his uncle Elias Openshaw had abruptly returned to England to settle on an estate in Sussex after living for many years as a planter in Florida and serving as a Colonel in the Confederate Army. It commences in truly classic Watson fashion: ‘When I glance over my notes and records of the Sherlock Holmes cases between the years ‘82 and ‘90, I am faced by so many which present strange and interesting features that it is no easy matter to know which to choose and which to leave.’
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Dying Detective’, His Last Bow. Some Later Reminiscences of Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 1917), appearing in the Strand Magazine in December 1913. Now back in medical practice, Watson is called to 221B Baker Street to tend Holmes, who is apparently dying of a rare Asian disease contracted while he was on a case at Rotherhithe. Mrs. Hudson says that he has neither eaten nor drunk anything in three days. Watson is shocked, having heard nothing about his friend’s illness. Although widely considered among the lesser of Doyle’s 56 Sherlock Holmes short stories, as always it contains nuggets such as the opening lines: ‘Mrs. Hudson, the landlady of Sherlock Holmes, was a long-suffering woman. Not only was her first-floor flat invaded at all hours by throngs of singular and often undesirable characters but her remarkable lodger showed an eccentricity and irregularity in his life which must have sorely tried her patience’.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Adventure of the Illustrious Client’, The Casebook of Sherlock Holmes (John Murray, 1927), appearing in the Strand Magazine in two parts in February and March 1925. A ‘Sir James Damery’, presumably of legal fame, comes to see Holmes and Watson about an illustrious client’s problem (the client’s identity is never revealed, although Watson finds out at the end of the story). Old General de Merville’s daughter Violet has fallen madly in love with Austrian Baron Adelbert Gruner. Both Sir James and Holmes are convinced the Baron is a murderer, the victim being his last wife, though he was acquitted of her murder because of a legal technicality and a witness’s untimely death. She met her end in the Splügen Pass. Wonderful lines from it include ‘Both Holmes and I had a weakness for the Turkish bath. It was over a smoke in the pleasant lassitude of the drying-room that I have found him less reticent and more human than anywhere else’.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Musgrave Ritual’, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1894), and Episode XVIII in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’, is among the best-loved of all the stories and - unusually - narrated by Sherlock Holmes himself, but as one affectionate critic, M. W. Tooley, put it back in 1980, ‘Unfortunately it is also one of the richest depositories of strange anomalies and questionable clues. The more we investigate the details and circumstances the more inexplicable they become.’ Could it have been Holmes’s recounting which led to so many anomalies and questionable clues? By contrast, aficionados rate The Boscombe Valley Mystery highly because of the way Conan Doyle builds up the character of the murderer so completely.
Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Boscombe Valley Mystery’, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (George Newnes, 1892), and Episode IV in the Strand Magazine ‘Adventures of Sherlock Holmes’.
Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles (George Newnes, 1902). Originally serialised in the Strand Magazine from August 1901 to April 1902, it is set largely on Dartmoor in Devon in England’s West Country and tells the story of an attempted murder inspired by the legend of a fearsome, diabolical hound. The third of Conan Doyle’s four Sherlock Holmes novels, it contains an arresting comment by a James Mortimer M.R.C.S., a House-surgeon at Charing Cross Hospital who brought the mysterious death of Sir Charles Baskerville to Holmes’s attention. When Holmes solves the case, Mortimer says to him, ‘You interest me very much, Mr. Holmes...A cast of your skull, sir, until the original is available’.
Acknowledgements
A singular pleasure in writing a novel is how people with great expertise will respond so positively to an author’s request for information or advice. What camera (and more to the point, what plates?) would Watson have taken to the Reichenbach Falls in 1905? The answer came from Dr Michael Pritchard FRPS, the present-day Director-General of the Royal Photography Society. His expertise helped me construct the scene at the Reichenbach Falls where, like Moriarty 14 years earlier, Watson’s Sanderson Bellows camera and its precious dark slide tumbled over the edge into the roiling waters below. Or when Watson talks of his ‘Service revolver’, what calibre was it and what sort of ammo would he have used? Ask Mike Noble or Jeff Sobel (see below)...