This week’s Parade magazine lets you compare your pay with the annual earnings of a Seattle bridge operator ($53,575) or a Baltimore street-corner astronomer ($6,423). But how does your salary stack up against what Albert Einstein or Marie Curie made back in the day?
Stephen Pritchard, a content marketer for a London-based job search site called Adzuna, calculated the inflation-adjusted salaries for Einstein, Curie and nine other famous scientists. The results suggest that Isaac Newton should have asked for a raise.
“it’s worth bearing in mind that these reported salaries come from different stages in the scientists’ careers,” Pritchard wrote in a blog posting. “Einstein’s genius was well-established when he arrived at Princeton University, for example, while Newton was almost 20 years away from publishing his theory on gravity. And of course, while it’s interesting to compare the salaries of some of history’s great scientists, stating how much money from the 17th century is worth in the 21st century has its problems.”
