Early journal policies
We are probably justified in assuming that Einstein, over-come with the novelty of receiving such a report, barely glanced at the 10-page set of referee comments he was sent. German journals in the early part of the 20th century were considerably less fastidious than the Physical Review about what they published. Infeld claimed that the German attitude, in contrast to that prevailing in Britain and America, was “better a wrong paper than no paper at all.” 5 In a March 1936 letter to Einstein, the relativist and fellow European exile Cornelius Lanczos, who had himself been on the receiving end of one of Robertson’s reports, remarked on “the rigorous criticism common for American journals” such as the Physical Review. 10
Historians Christa Jungnickel and Russel McCormmach have studied in some detail the editorial policies of Annalen der Physik, the leading German journal of the early 1900s, and note that “the rejection rate of the journal was remarkably low, no higher than five or ten percent.” 11 They describe the editors’ reluctance to reject papers from established physicists, even relatively junior ones. As they put it, “Now and then the journal published bad papers by good physicists.” In one specific example, editor Paul Drude annoyed Max Planck by printing what Planck considered a worthless paper, whose author had “appealed to [Drude] personally, and Drude lacked the heart to refuse him.” 11
Planck’s own editorial philosophy was to “shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than that of having been too gentle in evaluating them.” 10 In America things were different, although Robertson and Tate surely treated Einstein more gently than they would have many others. Indeed, Robertson, in his very next report to Tate, commented that the author “is a man of good scientific standing, and it would seem to me that if he insists, he has more right to be heard than any single referee has to throttle!” That dispute turned more on matters of interpretation, though, and when it came to a paper that might actually be wrong, even an Einstein had to be queried, however gently.
Doubtless the rigorous criticism may have come as something of a shock to Einstein, who was accustomed to gentler treatment early in his career. However, Einstein could be very frank and direct in his criticism of others’ work. From 1914 on, as a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences, he was regularly called on to review articles submitted to the academy’s proceedings. The German word for worthless frequently occurs in those brief reviews. As a member of the academy, Einstein had his papers published without question or revision. Anything less must have seemed to him a tremendous slight.