First mention of Einstein in Science Fiction?

Question

We have seen Edison in a sort of War of the Worlds sequel written soon after Wells' novel but I do not think he authorized it.

My guess is Einstein came much later, his name and work not nearly as familiar as that of the inventor responsible for an invention used daily now by billions.

If there is an early mention of Einstein, I wonder if Wells was the first. In the movie The Time Machine (with Pearce) Einstein is explicitly mentioned as a collaborator to Pearce's character, but the 1960 version I do not think mentioned time travel or relativity.

Answer 1

1920: "The Light Machine", a short story by Ray Cummings in All-Story Weekly, June 19, 1920, available at the Internet Archive.

"As you can see," the professor continued. "I know all about Light—I am its master. No one in the world knows as much about Light as I do. And only one man in the world thinks he does." The professor's eyes gleamed vindictively. "Ah, how I hate him, that man!"

"Who?" Tubby asked with interest. "What is his name?"

"His name is Einstein," answered the professor. "I hate him—I loathe him—I despise him."

This is a science fiction story, but some people may wrongly disqualify it because it is framed as a dream.

Summary by Everett F. Bleiler in Science-Fiction: The Early Years:

Tubby and his friends are discussing such matters as the speed of light when Professor Obadiah Gate enters and introduces himself to Tubby as a Professor of Light. The professor takes Tubby to his laboratory, where there is a strange-looking machine. The professor explains: Since the universe is finite, according to Einstein, light must return to its starting point. A further implication is that the amount of light is limited and must be reused and recombined over and over. The professor's invention recaptures such old returning light and extracts images. He shows Tubby Nero and the burning of Rome—but then Tubby awakes and realizes he has fallen asleep watching a motion picture on the same topic.

Answer 2

The Skylark of Space by Doc Smith, published in 1928, has this:

"Well, I have heard you speak of traveling with the velocity of light, but that is overdrawn, isn't it?"

"Not very much. Our figures show that with this four-hundred-pound bar"—pointing to the copper cylinder in the exact center of the inner sphere—"we could develop not only the velocity of light, but an acceleration equal to that velocity, were it not for the increase in mass at high velocities, as shown by Einstein and others. We can't go very fast near the earth, of course, as the friction of the air would melt the whole works in a few minutes.

Answer 3

I'm adding this answer just in case my 1920 entry is rejected for being framed as "only a dream".

1923: "The Pikestaffe Case", a novelette by Algernon Blackwood, serialized in Cassell's Magazine "between 7/23 and 9/23" according to the ISFDB. It was reprinted in (among other places) The Best Supernatural Tales of Algernon Blackwood, which can be borrowed (for free but registration required) from the Internet Archive.

Excerpt:

The examination left her bewildered and uninspired. "I couldn't make them out at all," she put it. But they were evidently what she called costly volumes, and that she liked. "Something to do with his work, I suppose—-mathematics, and all that," she decided, after turning over pages covered with some kind of hieroglyphics, symbols being a word she did not know in that connection. There was no printing, there were no sentences, there was nothing she could lay hold of, and the diagrams she thought perhaps were Euclid, or possibly astronomical. Most of the names were odd and quite unknown to her. Gauss! Minowski! [sic] Lobatchewski! And it affronted her that some of these were German. A writer named Einstein was popular with her lodger, and that, she felt, was a pity, as well as a mistake in taste. It all alarmed her a little; or, rather she felt that touch of respect, almost of awe, pertaining to some world entirely beyond her ken. She was rather glad when the search—it was a duty—ended.

Everett F. Bleiler's review in Science-Fiction: The Early Years:

A concern with non-Euclidean geometry, relativity, and the mathematical fourth dimension. * The story is told through the personality of Mrs. Speke, a superior keeper of a London rooming house. The tenant who occupies the most expensive of her rooms is John Laking Thorley, M. A., Canta., and a mathematical coach of private means. * Thorley is a thorough gentleman, but Mrs. Speke finds herself with ambivalent feelings about him. His rooms display strange chalk marks on the carpets; silk threads lead from the walls; and the mirror is turned face to the wall. * Mrs. Speke cannot account for her forebodings, even when Thorley brings in wagonloads of books and scientific equipment—which are then not to be seen in his rooms. Thorley's books are by Einstein, Lobatchewski, and similar men. * Thorley is obviously performing an experiment together with the Pikestaffe boy, a gifted young mathematician, and there is some danger involved. * One evening Mrs. Speke hears Thorley calling for help. She enters his rooms, but sees nothing. The police, later, can find nothing, and the Pikestaffe boy is similarly missing. The cries for help continue, but after about six months cease. * Some time later a former charge of Mrs. Speke's takes the untenanted rooms, turns the mirror back around and—collapses, as does Mrs. Speke. In the glassless mirror are to be seen Thorley and the Pikestaffe boy, floating in infinite space and obviously quite happy. They have entered the fourth dimension, which is a higher state of being.

Answer 4

My answer to this question:

First science fiction story to refer to a real and living (at the time) scientist?

Says that Albert Einstein was mentioned at least twice in the Skylark of Space (1928).

My answer to this question:

First story to mention the speed of light?

Has only one quotation that mentions Einstein by name, in chapter VIII "indirect Action".

Regaining his self-possession as the wisdom of his friend's advice came home to him, Seaton sat down and pulled out his pipe. There was a tense silence for an instant. Then he leaped to his feet and darted into his room, returning with an object-compass whose needle pointed upward.

"DuQuesne did it," he cried exultantly. "This baby is still looking right at him. Now let's go—make it snappy!"[531]

"Not yet. We should find out how far away they are; that may give us an idea."

Suiting action to word, he took up his stopwatch and set the needle swinging. They watched it with strained faces as second after second went by and it still continued to swing. When it had come to rest Crane read his watch and made a rapid calculation.

"About three hundred and fifty million miles," he stated. "Clear out of our solar system already, and from the distance covered he must have had a constant acceleration so as to approximate the velocity of light, and he is still going with full...."

"But nothing can possibly go that fast, Mart, it's impossible. How about Einstein's theory?"

"That is a theory, this measurement of distance is a fact, as you know from our tests."

"That's right. Another good theory gone to pot. But how do you account for his distance? D'you suppose he's lost control?"

https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20869/pg20869-images.html

Smith wrote The Skylark of Space between 1915 and 1921.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Skylark_of_Space

So 1915 is the earliest year Einstein could have been mentioned while writing, 1921 is the latest year that the mention of Einstein could have been added in a revision, and 1928 is the earliest that magazine readers could have read that mention of Einstein.

So any mention of Einstein in science fiction after 1928 would be later than in The Skylark of Space, any mention of Einstein in science fiction between 1905 and 1915 would be before The Skylark of Space, and any mention of Einstein in science fiction between 1915 and 1928 would be a borderline case.

Answer 5

Another 1923 entry is Farnsworth Wright's "An Adventure in the Fourth Dimension", a surreal tale with a "it was all a dream" ending published in the October 1923 issue of Weird Tales.

From the last two paragraphs:

"...I found myself in my own parlor. The air was full of flying leaves, which I was madly tearing from a book and throwing toward the ceiling. The book was a treatise on the Einstein theory of space, which I had borrowed from a friend that afternoon. I had read nearly a page in it before I fell asleep.
Only twelve men in the whole world would understand the Einstein theory, it is said. If I had read the book, I would be the thirteenth..."