Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt, which warned of the threat of Germany building nuclear weapons and resulted in the creation of the Manhattan Project, will be auctioned this fall at Christie’s.
The letter comes from the famed collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
Estimated to sell for $4 million to $6 million, the letter is one of two written at the time with the help of scientist Leo Szilard. The original letter is held at the Roosevelt Presidential Library. This second, slightly shorter copy, was kept by Szilard and eventually sold by his heirs. Allen purchased the letter from Malcolm Forbes for $2.1 million in 2002.
Einstein’s manuscript on the theory of relativity sold for more than $13 million in 2021.
Allen, who died in 2018, was a prolific collector, setting a posthumous record in 2022 when his art collection sold for a combined $1.62 billion.
The Einstein letter will be joined by a wide swath of items representing “the history of human ingenuity,” Christie’s wrote in a release.
A suit worn by NASA astronaut Ed White, who became the first American to conduct a spacewalk in June 1965, in his official NASA portrait and in his Gemini training will also sell, carrying an estimate of $80,000 to $120,000.
Proceeds from the auction will be donated to charity.
“Looking at the collection as a whole, you’re able to see the building blocks of the most cutting-edge technology that exists today,” said Devang Thakkar, global head of Christie’s Ventures, in a release. “Whether that’s the smartphone in your pocket that has billions of transistors or the watch on your wrist that you can call someone with. The technologies and discoveries represented in this collection enabled those advances.”
Also included in the auction of Allen’s collection, which Christie’s has dubbed “Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection,” is a 1971 DEC PDP-10 computer, which comes from a series of computers known as pioneers in creating the early foundation for the internet.
Will Stern is a reporter and editor for cllct.