Gaming IndustryLate Microsoft co-founder’s treasure hoard of artefacts to be auctioned, includes a letter Einstein sent to Roosevelt that ultimately led to the Manhattan ProjectWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Gaming IndustryLate Microsoft co-founder’s treasure hoard of artefacts to be auctioned, includes a letter Einstein sent to Roosevelt that ultimately led to the Manhattan ProjectWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
(Image credit: Bettmann via Getty Images)
Paul Allen was the co-founder of Microsoft, a computing pioneer, and one of the world’s great philanthropists.Allen died in 2018, at the age of 65, and at the time his co-founder Bill Gates paid tribute to “a brilliant technologist and philanthropist who wanted to accomplish great things, and did.”
Allen left Microsoft in 1983, following a diagnosis for Hodgkin’s lymphoma, though remained on the board of directors until 2000 and became extraordinarily wealthy, with estimates putting his net worth at over $20 billion. During his life Allen donated more than $2bn to charitable causes, built museums, owned the NBA’s Portland Trail Blazers and the Seattle Seahawks football team, and amassed a quite incredible collection of computing and scientific artefacts.
Allen’s art collection was auctioned in 2022, raising over $1.6 billion for charitable causes, and Christie’s has now announcedan auction of artefactsfrom his personal collection, to be held in New York this September (thanks, BBC). It’s called Gen One: Innovations from the Paul G. Allen Collection and includes a letter from Albert Einstein, written to President Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1939, which warns that Nazi Germany may be able to create atomic weapons, and suggests that the US start its own atomic programme.
This letter played a key part in Roosevelt ordering further investigation and research funding before, three years later, the Manhattan Project and the development of the world’s first nuclear weapons began. Christie’s has given the letter an estimated value of between $4 million and $6 million.
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“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 Thakker of Christies. “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.”
As with Visionary, the sale of Allen’s art, all the estate’s proceeds from Gen One “will be dedicated to philanthropy, as pursuant to Mr. Allen’s wishes.”
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