Einstein’s First Lecture in Britain
Tidying a few things up ahead of the start of term I discovered this old clipping, yellowed with age, and decided to scan it before it disintegrates entirely:
It is from the (then) Manchester Guardian which is now known as the Grauniad. The article is dated 1st October 1921, which implies that the talk must have been on the afternoon of Friday 30th September 1921. However, the University of Manchester website states that the talk was on June 9th 1921. During his visit, Einstein was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science by the University of Manchester, which is recorded here as having been presented on June 8th, so it appears the Guardian piece was published some time after the event. As usual, Einstein gave his lecture – to a packed house – entirely in German, as he did when he lectured in Nottingham almost a decade later.
Einstein was already famous by 1921 – largely thanks to the 1919 Eclipse results (see, e.g., here) – but it was still before he won his Nobel Prize (in 1922).
Anyway, the text down the right-hand side of the Guardian piece can be found here; it’s well worth reading!
In the Dark 
September 12, 2025 at 7:36 pm
I don’t know if Einstein visited Manchester and its university physicists more than once, but on one such occasion – maybe this one – he played his violin accompanied on the piano by a woman called Susan Scott Dickson, wife of one of the physicists, with the others banging on the door to get in and talk science. I know this because, decades later, I and my father often sat with her at Old Trafford cricket ground in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She was a widow by then; I never met her husband.
September 12, 2025 at 8:32 pm
Apparently he stayed 3 days in Manchester in 1921 so it could have been during that visit.