Science treasures from Microsoft mogul up for auction — and researchers are salivating

Science-history lovers, check your bank balances.

Virtual bidding opened today on a trove of science-history treasures from the estate of Microsoft mogul Paul Allen. Some of the most prized pieces will be auctioned live next month in New York City, including physicist Albert Einstein’s 1939 letter alerting then-US president Franklin D. Roosevelt that the Germans had discovered fissionable uranium; a spacesuit that was part of NASA’s Gemini IV mission, the first in which an astronaut ‘walked’ in space; and correspondence from the pioneering primatologists Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey and Louis Leakey.

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Allen amassed the items — which scientists and museum curators alike are ogling — over the course of his life. At the time of his death in 2018, Allen’s net worth was estimated to be more than US$20 billion, the result of his having developed software for the first personal computers and co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975. After leaving Microsoft, Allen dabbled in various ventures, including founding the Allen Institutes for brain science, artificial intelligence and cell science, and funding SpaceShipOne — which in 2004 became the first private ship to carry people into space.

“It’s a testament to Paul Allen that he put this [collection] together,” says Randall Berry, a computer engineer at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “You could tell he was really trying to capture something that he lived partly through, for posterity.”

Nature spoke to researchers and curators about the items they are drooling over, and their hopes for what will happen to them after the auction.

Four-rotor Enigma cipher machine

This machine from 1941 was central to the “dawn of computing”, says Voula Saridakis, a curator at the Griffin Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, Illinois. During the Second World War, the Nazis used Enigma machines to encrypt top-secret military plans. British mathematician Alan Turing, along with other code breakers, came up with a system to crack the ciphers using maths and logic. This work was instrumental to the development of Colossus, the world’s first programmable electronic computer, which decoded another type of encrypted message and could solve more than 100 codes for the Allied powers per week. “This problem that no human mind could tackle, unaided, necessitated the development of computers,” says Sam Lemley, a curator at Carnegie Mellon University Libraries in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, home to a computing-history collection.

Correspondence from Louis Leakey, Jane Goodall and Dian Fossey

These iconic figures in primatology put human evolution into the public spotlight in the 1970s and 1980s. With funding from the Wilkie Brothers Foundation in Illinois, Leakey sent Goodall and Fossey to study wild chimpanzees and gorillas in the African wilderness. They shared their research with the Wilkie family through letters and photographs, and sent the family tools that chimpanzees used to extract ants from anthills, which Goodall had collected. “The things that chimpanzees did, that we thought were exclusively human behaviours, turned out to be shared by our closest relatives,” says Karen Strier, a primatologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “It made people feel a part of nature.”

Astronaut Ed White’s back-up spacesuit

Although White did not float in space in this particular suit in 1965, Pablo de León, leader of the Human Spaceflight Laboratory at the University of North Dakota in Grand Forks, says it will probably go for a higher price than the upper estimate of $120,000 listed because the suit that White did wear has been damaged. “UV [ultraviolet] light degraded the bladder of the spacesuit,” he says, and the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington DC, which owns it, removed it from display and treated it to prevent further damage. The back-up suit is reportedly in excellent condition.

Apple I personal computer

Apple I was the first pre-assembled, commercially available personal computer. This particular one from 1976 sat in the office of Steve Jobs, who co-founded the technology firm Apple. Before this machine came onto the scene, hobbyists bought kits and parts to build their own computers. Only about 200 Apple I computers were made, and many of them were returned when the company brought out Apple II in 1977 and offered discounts and trade-ins for customers to upgrade. Lemley thinks that this computer will probably see the most competitive bidding in the auction, “not because it’s necessarily the most interesting or the most important item in the sale, but because Apple has just really captured the imagination of so many people”.

Astronaut James Lovell’s handwritten logbook from Apollo 8

NASA’s Apollo 8 was the first crewed mission to fly around the Moon. The 1968 mission was important not only for setting the stage for the historic Apollo 11 landing of astronauts on the Moon, but also for “seeing the far side of the Moon for the first time with human eyes, and seeing Earth as a planet for the first time”, Saridakis says. As the mission’s command module orbited the Moon, astronaut William Anders captured the iconic ‘Earthrise’ photo, and Lovell, who piloted the module, made navigational notes in this logbook.

Finding a home

Many of these objects will probably end up in the hands of private collectors, at least initially. Museum curators who spoke to Nature say that most artefacts in their collections — about 80% — were donated. Of the remainder, a small percentage were purchased, and some are on loan from private collectors. Saridakis says it’s uncommon for the Griffin Museum of Science and Technology to bid at such “big, high-profile collection auctions”. Instead, private collectors bid on expensive items, which they might gift to museums.

One concern scientists have about historical artefacts winding up in private hands is that the objects might not be cared for properly, Saridakis says. Her message to collectors is to “do your homework” and consult with professional conservators to ensure that items are stored or displayed correctly, to preserve them “for hundreds of years, if not longer”.

Museums more often end up with rare texts and archaeological remains, Lemley says, than with modern items such as mainframe computers. That’s because modern artefacts “are really cumbersome objects to curate and store and conserve”, he adds, noting that they are made with a diverse range of materials, including plastic, silicon, lithium and cadmium, for which there isn’t as much precedent for preserving. “How do you preserve these things that really were never built to last longer than a decade?” Lemley asks.

Whether Allen’s prized possessions end up in private or museum collections, what matters to Strier and Berry is that the items are protected, and that people interested in them know where they are. “I think it would be a shame for these things to be just squirrelled away somewhere where no one gets to see them,” Berry says.

The auction will be held in three parts; the first two are virtual, beginning today and ending on 12 September. The third will be live on 10 September at Christie’s auction house in New York City.