V O L U M E 9 , D O C U M E N T 5 9 a 1 1 9
cm of snow for a couple of days now, but it’s very wet so it’s no fun to tramp around
in
it.[9]
By the way, we need money very badly, because everything’s so expensive
and Mama needed the deposits at the bank for
Teddi.[10]
Please send us some as
soon as possible.
Many greetings from
Adn and Teddy
P. S. Just now the money (2,000 francs) arrived and Mama sends her thanks.
Vol. 9, 59a. From Hans Albert Einstein
[Zurich, before 13 June
1919][1]
Dear Papa,
Thank you very much for the music
scores.[2]
I already played some of the piec-
es out of them and last week I had an examination at music
school.[3]
It went very
well. I played a few preludes from Heller (Op.
81).[4]
The pieces are quite nice but
the headings are even more wonderful, like, e.g., “While expressing the bitterest of
pain.” Heller thinks if the notes don’t produce it, then the player must. Otherwise I
haven’t been playing anything interesting recently.
At school we started the Crusades in history and it’s still about as boring as
before.[5]
We also started English, where the pronunciation seems quite ludicrous
to us at first. In natural history, botany, we have a jumble of cell theory, plant tax-
onomy, tissue theory and all the rest. It’s most interesting when there are experi-
ments. We’ve also started physics now but aren’t past the introduction yet. We’re
going to go through mechanics. Our teacher is Prof. Stierlin. For mathematics we
still have young Mr.
Folkhart,[6]
whose lessons are very nice and one learns quite a
lot. We’ve begun trigonometry and exponential theory and are using logarithmic ta-
bles with great relish when we want to write out the roots. It’s quite a lot of fun,
particularly that one can apply it so often. In geometry we just started in the last
lesson the algebraic solving of geometric problems. Nothing difficult is taken into
consideration there yet, of course.
Something just occurred to me that I wanted to ask you. If you have a sail of size
f on a sailboat, how can you calculate the sideward pressure of an average wind and
how large does the weight hanging at distance l from the rotational axis have to be
in order to withstand the strength of the sail? One probably couldn’t discuss this in
just a few words; then we could save this up for the summer vacation. For I attached
a weight of 200 gr just to see what happens and the result was that it immediately
fell over. It’s the boat that you saw in the beginning
stage.[7]