Nutty professor or one cool dude?

First there was Albert Einstein: genius, revolutionizer of the physical world, champion of Zionism, hero of pacifism.

Then there was Albert Einstein™. He is another thing entirely.

Albert Einstein™ is a brand name. It belongs to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and is administered by The Roger Richman Agency Inc. of Beverly Hills, Calif. The Roger Richman Agency Inc. is very particular about the brand. “When written in copy on all materials, the name ‘Albert Einstein™’ must always bear a ™ symbol,” it insists.

James Cheng / MSNBC.com The Albert Einstein™ Action Figure is just one of hundreds of products manufactured each year — properly licensed or unlicensed — that trade on Einstein’s iconic image.

It is a lucrative trademark. Over the years, Einstein has burrowed himself into the world’s consciousness as the pre-eminent symbol of all things brainy, and marketers like their products to be considered brainy.

For example, Apple Computer and Micrografx Inc. have licensed his likeness to sell computers and software, respectively. Krone sells a $6,950 sterling silver fountain pen named for him. The Walt Disney Co. runs a division in his honor that markets merchandise to educate infants and toddlers — Baby Einstein. All of those uses, of course, were properly licensed.

Somewhere along the way, however, Albert Einstein™ got hijacked by hucksters. These are also among products you can buy today, some of them unlicensed:

• Einstein sterling silver-plated spoons.
• Einstein “Get a Half-Life” coffee mugs.
• Einstein Holy Prayer Cards. They depict Einstein in a purple robe surrounded by a halo, in front of a chalkboard.
• The Ultimate Albert Einstein Carrot Cake. “Albert Einstein’s genius lives on in this carrot cake,” its manufacturer says.
• The “Learn Like Einstein, Earn Like Gates” home business course.
• Einstein wig, mustache and eyebrows sets. “Look like this famous genius!” the company says, although, if you were to wear these muskrat brown attachments, you would look less like a famous genius than you would a famous genius who has had a family of chinchillas die on his head.
• And of course, there’s the Albert Einstein Theory of Relativity Junior Baby Doll. As in lingerie.

Slide show Life of genius View a photographic timeline spanning the life of Albert Einstein. more photos

“Einstein’s gone beyond the figure that he is into iconic status,” said Jim Tobin, a partner in Brogan & Partners Convergence Marketing, the firm that put K-Mart and Martha Stewart together. “He stands for almost any great idea now.”

The two faces of Einstein
Albert Einstein™, clearly, is a powerful brand. What is interesting is that it rests on a very particular image that we carry around in our heads — that of the old Einstein, with the electrified hair and the droopy mustache and the indifferent wardrobe. The Einstein sticking out his tongue in the famous 1951 United Press photograph. The Einstein portrayed by Walter Matthau in “I.Q.”

This is the Albert Einstein™ who, almost without exception, is portrayed as a nutty professor by the merchandise exploiting his brilliance. We don’t, however, pay much notice to the Albert Einstein of E=mc². This Einstein — the non-trademarked one who published those astonishing papers in Annalen der Physik — was a different fellow.

Hulton Archive via Getty Images Einstein around 1905.

Pictures of Einstein in 1905 show a relatively well-groomed 26-year-old man dressed sharply for the government job he held at the patent office in Bern, Switzerland. This Einstein is vigorous-looking and just a little devilish, with a rather jaunty face. He looks, more than anything else, like a happier Edgar Allen Poe.

Give him a modern makeover, and this Einstein would be right at home before a camera, patiently yet urbanely explaining the intricacies of stem-cell research or the Mars rovers to cable TV audiences.

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