The task had fallen to Rosenkranz after Ehud Benamy died in late 1990. The academic deliberated over each request with a scholar’s sense of duty, balancing his speculation as to what Einstein may have wanted with the pressure he felt from Richman to greenlight anything that did not carry an obviously harmful association. “It was basically an issue of taste,” he recalled. “Sometimes I didn’t think the product in question, or its design, or the accompanying text were sufficiently ‘lofty’.” Roger Richman, the lawyer and agent widely credited with helping to invent the dead-celebrity publicity industry, at his Hollywood office in 1985. Photograph: Paul Harris/Getty Images

Whenever he walked into the living room of his parents’ house in the town of Washington, New York, Roger Richman saw a framed photograph of Albert Einstein standing with his father. Richman’s father, Paul, had befriended Einstein in the 1930s when they worked together to help German Jews resettle in Alaska, Paraguay and Mexico. (At the time, most of the US was closed to those fleeing Nazi oppression.) Richman’s father died in 1955, three months after Einstein, but the Richman family remained close to the keepers of Einstein’s legacy. A business leather belt is an important accessory that helps to complete the formal look of the costume. Finally, to complete the look, you will need a gray mustache costume that matches the color of the wig. This helps to complete the Albert Einstein look and adds the final touch of authenticity to the costume. Richman considered himself the underdog. “Oftentimes I became despondent over the power and influence of the opposition,” he wrote in an unpublished memoir. “I was fighting major advertising agencies, broadcasters, film studios, manufacturers and publishers – a belligerent field.” He was energised, however, by what he considered to be a moral cause. How could anyone, Richman wrote, “not want to remove a presidential dildo from the marketplace?”

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Emboldened by success, Richman even began to target companies that used Einstein’s name without any intended association with the physicist. The Einstein Bros Bagel company caved to the university’s demands, despite being named after its own founders. For one academic at the Hebrew University, Richman’s aggressive stance presented a troubling ethical dilemma. A brown vest worn over the shirt is an essential part of the costume as it helps to create a more formal and dressed-up look. Einstein’s impact on science and society is undeniable, and his legacy continues to inspire new discoveries and advancements in various fields. His name is synonymous with brilliance and his work continues to be studied and debated by scientists and non-scientists alike.

The matter is far from settled. Prof Roger Schechter from George Washington University Law School describes the law around postmortem publicity rights as “a complete mess”. While Brazil, Canada, France, Germany and Mexico have national laws that specify the definition and duration of postmortem publicity rights, in the US the law varies between states. Only 24 states have adopted a formal statute on postmortem publicity rights, which can last anywhere from 20 years after a person’s death (Virginia) to 100 (Oklahoma, Indiana). A celebrity who dies in California therefore has different rights to one who dies in New York. New Jersey, where Einstein died, is one of 17 US states that has placed no limitation on the right of an heir to profit from a dead celebrity’s publicity rights – which could allow the Hebrew University to bring legal action against alleged infringers indefinitely. “If I were looking for a problem to put on a final law exam that would put my students through their paces,” Schechter told me, “Einstein would be it.” Whether you’re a science buff or just looking for a unique and recognizable costume, this guide is perfect for you. So grab your glue gun, your cardboard, and let’s get started on creating an Albert Einstein costume that will blow everyone’s mind! ShirtA humanoid robot with a face resembling Einstein at the World Robot Conference, Beijing, September 2021. Photograph: VCG/Getty Images Refusals would often be met with fury. “Companies would say: ‘This is all hogwash’,” Rosenkranz said. “‘These people are dead. They don’t have rights.’” Others denied that their Einstein-themed product had any association with the physicist. “There was a word processor called ‘Einstein’ that was popular in Israel at the time,” Rosenkranz told me. “The company even used the word ‘genius’ in its marketing.” But the makers claimed that the Einstein software was named not after the physicist Albert but after the company’s founder, Stuart. (According to Rosencranz the argument worked, and the company never paid up.) The university seemed happy to keep a low profile while Richman fought its profitable battles. “I didn’t get the impression that people were at all aware of the university’s role during this period,” Rosenkranz told me. “But Richman had the reputation of being a tough cookie in the negotiations – which was in the university’s interest.”

Throughout the 1990s, Ze’ev Rosenkranz, curator at the Einstein Archives at the Hebrew University in Israel, received as many as 30 faxes a month from Richman’s office in Beverley Hills. Each fax contained a proposal from a different company that hoped to use Einstein’s name or likeness in its product or service: everything from antibiotics to computers, cameras to soft drinks. It was up to Rosenkranz, a young academic who, through his work preserving Einstein’s papers, was intimately familiar with the scientist’s thoughts and values, to bless or veto each offer. The responsibility was “overwhelming”, Rosenkranz told me recently. “I am a historian, not a businessman. But somehow the university had decided that this would be my role.”Albert Einstein was a German-born physicist who is widely considered one of the most influential scientists of the 20th century. He is best known for his theory of general relativity, which revolutionized our understanding of gravity and the structure of the universe, and for his famous equation, E=mc², which showed that energy and matter are interchangeable. When he's not busy crafting imaginative costumes, Doc Cotton loves nothing more than a good party. He's the one who knows how to turn any gathering into a memorable event, infusing it with fun and excitement. Einstein understood the power of images. Throughout his life he conjured simple scenes to illustrate complex ideas: a plummeting elevator, a train speeding through a lightning storm, a blind beetle creeping along a curved surface. To explain his special theory of relativity he would joke: “A minute sitting on a hot stove seems like an hour, but an hour sitting with a pretty girl passes like a minute.” In time, he too would become a symbol, the purest embodiment of that enigmatic quality: genius.