From our notes, my wife will be able to reconstruct the
conversations with yourself and your wife … allowing us
to make your relationship with Haber come alive again.
But in the meantime, I am still interested in is the
smallest things you can remember and, in this respect,
it would suffice if you could record such reminiscences
in the form of keywords for me so that at a later meeting,
we could discuss these orally in extenso. [at full
length]
Professor Coates in Swansea has also given us most
valuable information and made available all of the
material which he collected for his memorial lecture.
We have therefore not only had a very pleasant holiday in
England but thanks to everyone’s benevolent understanding of my biography we take home very much more than
the memory of a pleasant holiday.
With the best regards, …
After receiving this letter Robert could have rightly assumed that his story
would one day be told, and even at the age of seventy-five he could still have
reasonably expected that Jaenicke’s biography might be published in his
lifetime. He may well have looked forward to that, but of course Jaenicke
never published. Seventeen years after the meeting at St Helier Robert passed
away, still largely unrecognised except by the few. The twists of fate that had
dogged the proper recognition of his contribution to ‘fixation’ during his life
continued; overwhelmed by the task in the late 1980s, Jaenicke presented all
his work to the MPG then ‘walked away’; based on his efforts, biographies of
Haber began to appear; in all of these the eyes of history have never bothered
to look into Haber’s shadow, and although some have referred to Robert’s
letter of 30 August 1959,
22 Jaenicke’s transcript—the last publicly available
contribution Robert was to make to our understanding of fixation—has been
overlooked. But surely, not now. Because together with Chirnside’s transcript
of his conversation with Robert in 1976 it provides the evidence for what we
suspected all along. That he was the engineer that created the technology of
fixation and that his relationship with Haber was closer and far more durable
than biographers had previously been able or willing to recognise.
18 Penn, Buckinghamshire 1949–1976
473
conversations with yourself and your wife … allowing us
to make your relationship with Haber come alive again.
But in the meantime, I am still interested in is the
smallest things you can remember and, in this respect,
it would suffice if you could record such reminiscences
in the form of keywords for me so that at a later meeting,
we could discuss these orally in extenso. [at full
length]
Professor Coates in Swansea has also given us most
valuable information and made available all of the
material which he collected for his memorial lecture.
We have therefore not only had a very pleasant holiday in
England but thanks to everyone’s benevolent understanding of my biography we take home very much more than
the memory of a pleasant holiday.
With the best regards, …
After receiving this letter Robert could have rightly assumed that his story
would one day be told, and even at the age of seventy-five he could still have
reasonably expected that Jaenicke’s biography might be published in his
lifetime. He may well have looked forward to that, but of course Jaenicke
never published. Seventeen years after the meeting at St Helier Robert passed
away, still largely unrecognised except by the few. The twists of fate that had
dogged the proper recognition of his contribution to ‘fixation’ during his life
continued; overwhelmed by the task in the late 1980s, Jaenicke presented all
his work to the MPG then ‘walked away’; based on his efforts, biographies of
Haber began to appear; in all of these the eyes of history have never bothered
to look into Haber’s shadow, and although some have referred to Robert’s
letter of 30 August 1959,
22 Jaenicke’s transcript—the last publicly available
contribution Robert was to make to our understanding of fixation—has been
overlooked. But surely, not now. Because together with Chirnside’s transcript
of his conversation with Robert in 1976 it provides the evidence for what we
suspected all along. That he was the engineer that created the technology of
fixation and that his relationship with Haber was closer and far more durable
than biographers had previously been able or willing to recognise.
18 Penn, Buckinghamshire 1949–1976
473