A 54-page draft of a research paper co-authored by Einstein and his friend, Swiss engineer Michel Bessot, sold for a record US$13 million.
According to Christie’s Auctions, which is in charge of auctioning the document, it is the highest price for any scientific manuscript.
The identity of the buyer is not disclosed. But this auction has attracted the interest of collectors from all over the world.
According to Christie’s Auctions, 26 pages of the manuscript were handwritten by Einstein himself, while the remaining 24 pages were written by Bessow. He said that the three pages were written together.
Many pages contain drafts. Somewhere, “stimmt!” It is even written in German. “Stimmmt!” The meaning of “It’s right” should be returned as close as possible.
This manuscript draft is a very rare one. Because Einstein never kept the manuscripts he scribbled. Even correspondence between him and other scholars was not kept.
Besso dutifully kept the handwritten draft he and Einstein wrote together. Including this draft, there are only two other drafts written about Einstein’s theory of relativity.
The value of this manuscript, even if it is in Einstein’s handwriting, is quite high.
Last May, a letter Einstein wrote to a rival physicist fetched $1.2 million at auction.
In 2017, two notes Einstein wrote to a doorman at a hotel in Tokyo were auctioned for $1.5 million.