Einstein’s favourite childhood toy is set to fetch up to £46,000 at auction 

Albert Einstein’s favourite childhood toy that he cherished all his life will go up for sale next month for £46,000 ($60,000).

The German game, titled ‘Perlen Mosaik Spiel’ (Mosaic Pearl Game), consists of 520 coloured beads that can be inserted into a punch-hole frame to create patterns.

The game shows some general signs of wear and tear, including minor chipping to the title label and ‘intriguing’ pencil markings inside the box, which may represent his first autograph.

The board game would have been cherished by the young and gifted physicist, who went on to win the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. 

Seller Bonhams New York describes the set as ‘a rare and joyous Einstein artefact of museum quality’ and ‘an essential learning tool for the young genius’. 

Measuring 10 by 7.3 by 1.5 inches, the precious memento was made in the 1870s and goes up for sale on March 6.

‘A childhood game that Einstein kept throughout his life, only gifting it at the time of his death, this toy was clearly an important personal memento from the earliest development of the young scientist,’ the auctioneer says on its website. 

The German physicist would have entertained himself for many hours as a young boy in the early 1880s playing with the pegboard, which he kept for the rest of his life.

His sister, Maja Epsietin, said that the games that young Albert played with as a child were characteristic of Albert’s capabilities.

‘These were mostly puzzles, fretsaw work, the erection of complicated structures with the well-known Anker building blocks, and above all the construction of multi-storied card castles, with which he filled his leisure,’ she once said.

Perlen-Mosiak is a decorative box with a sliding cover that contains the coloured beads. 

Einstein would have entertained himself for many hours as a young boy in the early 1880s with the pegboard

An adorable young Einstein at the age of 3 in 1882. Einstein did not return to Germany when Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933 because of his Jewish ancestory

These beads are placed in the punch-hole cover to form creative designs, letters or any kind of pattern.

Some psychologists see Perlen Mosiak as an important childhood learning tool that promote visual thinking and artistic imagination, as well as mathematical skills.

‘One can easily imagine Einstein’s neural synapses growing while he created diagrams and letters with this game,’ Bonhams says. 

Einstein’s famous theory of relativity, developed in 1905, transformed theoretical physics and astronomy during the 20th century

The early board game may have been instrumental in Einstein’s self-described tendency to ‘very rarely think in words at all’.

Einstein’s Perlen-Mosiak was gifted to a friend at the time of his death in 1955 and, according to media reports, sold last June for $13,000 (£10,200).

It was reportedly sold by Kestenbaum & Company alongside other personal items of Einstein’s, including napkins and shot glasses.  

The toy was displayed in an exhibit at the Mitsuo Aida Museum in Tokyo from 2005 to 2006. 

WHAT IS EINSTEIN’S GENERAL THEORY OF RELATIVITY?

Albert Einstein (pictured) published his General Theory of Relativity in 1915

In 1905, Albert Einstein determined that the laws of physics are the same for all non-accelerating observers, and that the speed of light in a vacuum was independent of the motion of all observers – known as the theory of special relativity.

This groundbreaking work introduced a new framework for all of physics, and proposed new concepts of space and time.

He then spent 10 years trying to include acceleration in the theory, finally publishing his theory of general relativity in 1915.

This determined that massive objects cause a distortion in space-time, which is felt as gravity.

At its simplest, it can be thought of as a giant rubber sheet with a bowling ball in the centre.

Pictured is the original historical documents related to Einstein’s prediction of the existence of gravitational waves, shown at the Hebrew university in Jerusalem

As the ball warps the sheet, a planet bends the fabric of space-time, creating the force that we feel as gravity.

Any object that comes near to the body falls towards it because of the effect.

Einstein predicted that if two massive bodies came together it would create such a huge ripple in space time that it should be detectable on Earth.

It was most recently demonstrated in the hit film film Interstellar.

In a segment that saw the crew visit a planet which fell within the gravitational grasp of a huge black hole, the event caused time to slow down massively.

Crew members on the planet barely aged while those on the ship were decades older on their return.