Einstein slept here? Maybe

Did Albert Einstein once sleep in one of the homes on this year's Clintonville Tour of Homes?

Theoretically, it's possible.

In a relative sense, the answer might be yes.

What current owner Sarah Ellis called a "Craftsmanesque" home at 92 Walhalla Road, with access off East California Avenue, took a long time to find when she and husband Nick came back to Columbus in 2006 from five years of living in Washington, D.C.

Fortunately, Sarah Ellis said, her mother-in-law is a real estate agent, and a patient one, at that.

When Nick's mom showed them the Walhalla Road house, Sarah Ellis said she was surprised that something in the city could seem to be so secluded in a peaceful woods.

"The pictures online didn't do it justice," she said. "I call it the tree house in the city."

Eventually, the Ellises called it home, and then some of the neighbors called on them to ask if they knew about the legend associated with the house.

What legend?

Why, the legend that Einstein, father of the theory of relativity and winner of the 1921 Nobel Prize in physics, once spent the night under their roof.

What makes that even vaguely possible, if not entirely likely, is that 92 Walhalla Road was once the home of Tibor Rado and his family.

The Hungarian-born mathematician, who came to the United States in 1929 in the wake of brutal experiences in a Siberian prison camp during World War I, joined the faculty of Ohio State University in 1930. Rado was chairman of the Department of Mathematics from 1946-48, when he was named a research professor, according to his obituary on the OSU Web site.

Rado died on Dec. 29, 1965.

Did Rado know Einstein? Might he have invited Einstein to take a break from his duties at Princeton to visit Columbus?

The online obituary mentions that Rado "interrupted his academic career to render a special service to the United States government" near the end of World War II. He was sent for a time to Germany to recruit scientists for his adopted country.

When Rado returned to the U.S. it was to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton.

Einstein, who renounced his German citizenship in 1933 and came to the United States, was a professor of theoretical physics at Princeton until his retirement in 1945, according to the Web site of the Nobel Foundation.

So maybe these two men of such similar background and interests met at the Ivy League school in New Jersey and became fast friends. Maybe they exchanged quiet visits with one another.

And, maybe not.

Sarah Ellis said that husband Nick, whom she described as something of a "realist," has tried to line up the stars to determine if it's possible Einstein came to Columbus, and so far failed to do so.

"It's a great story," Sarah Ellis said. "Who knows if it's absolutely true."

Wherever Einstein might have slept in the house, if he slept in the house, has been mightily changed from when the Rado family was in residence. Sarah Ellis said the place was in rental for a period, and there were some scratches on an exterior wall from where longtime residents said the renters used to feed dog food to raccoons.

However, 92 Walhalla Road has had three owners in the past 10 or 15 years who have given it some TLC, including, Sarah Ellis said, a custom home builder who put a lot of work into the place before deciding it might be best for the image of a custom home builder to live in a home he had custom-built.

"Clearly we've benefit," Ellis said.

And maybe, just maybe, 6-year-old son Thomas will benefit from staying under the same roof Einstein once did.

Or didn't.