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OPPENHEIMER (J. ROBERT) Robert Oppenheimer's passport with photograph for 1924, SIGNED TWICE ("J. Robert Oppenheimer"), 10 June 1924[-26] image 1
OPPENHEIMER (J. ROBERT) Robert Oppenheimer's passport with photograph for 1924, SIGNED TWICE ("J. Robert Oppenheimer"), 10 June 1924[-26] image 2
OPPENHEIMER (J. ROBERT) Robert Oppenheimer's passport with photograph for 1924, SIGNED TWICE ("J. Robert Oppenheimer"), 10 June 1924[-26] image 3
Lot 51

OPPENHEIMER (J. ROBERT)
Robert Oppenheimer's passport with photograph for 1924, SIGNED TWICE ("J. Robert Oppenheimer"), 10 June 1924[-26]

20 November 2024, 13:00 GMT
London, Knightsbridge

£15,000 - £25,000

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OPPENHEIMER (J. ROBERT)

Robert Oppenheimer's passport with photograph for 1924, SIGNED TWICE ("J. Robert Oppenheimer"), once as "signature of bearer", and once on the photograph portrait, countersigned with stamped signature of Secretary of State Charles E. Hughes, bifolium with numerous consulate and immigration stamps for travel to England (including arrival at Southampton on 16 September 1925), Italy, France and Germany, passport one-year extension stamp to June 1926, with 2 "cancelled" stamps and red paper seal clipped, the photograph excised but present (75 x 75mm.), old vertical and horizontal folds, folio (310 x 225mm.), 10 June 1924[-26]

Footnotes

'THE FATHER OF THE ATOMIC BOMB' - SIGNED PHOTOGRAPH PORTRAIT AND PASSPORT OF THE YOUNG J. ROBERT OPPENHEIMER, from the period spent studying at Harvard and Cambridge Universities.

Aged 20 when the passport was issued, Oppenheimer is described as 6ft.1in., oval face, blue eyes, roman nose and medium forehead. The photograph, with his validation signature, shows him aged seventeen and is the same as used for his application for a passport in 1921. In the summer of 1924 he travelled to Europe with his family and, having graduated from Harvard, arrived at Southampton the following year on 16 September to take up his place at Cambridge, where he spent two tumultuous terms. Importantly for his future career it was here that he was first introduced to pioneering theories of quantum mechanics by Paul Dirac and Ralph Fowler. But much of his time in England was difficult for Oppenheimer as he was suffering from mental stress and clashed with his tutor, the future Nobel laureate Patrick Blackett, whom he is said to have tried to kill with an apple laced with cyanide. In 1926 he left for the University of Göttingen to study under Max Born.

Provenance: Bert G. Reynolds (1894-1970). Reynolds lived in Cambridge all his life, establishing his electrics business Renbro Ltd. in the 1920s. In 1936 he moved to Grantchester Meadows on the death of his aunt Elizabeth, where it is believed the passport was discovered ('...I was living in a miserable hole... Then in the spring I moved out to a place along the river half way to Grantchester which was less miserable...', Oppenheimer, quoted in Kimball Smith and Weiner, Robert Oppenheimer, Letters & Recollections, 1980); Colin Reynolds (1930-2023); by descent.

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