How Does Your Salary Compare With Albert Einstein’s Pay?

In case you’ve ever wondered whether changing the world is worth it financially, a jobs search site has done the homework for you.

Adzuna, a British jobs site whose ValueMyCV feature puts a dollar value on resumes, recently researched the salaries earned by famous scientists who’ve left their mark on history. Adzuna then converted the salaries to their 2016 equivalents.

For example, Albert Einstein’s 1933 salary of $10,000 is equivalent to about $178,000 today, making him the highest-paid scientist that Adzuna researched.

Einstein had suggested a salary of $3,000, but his employer, which was Princeton University at the time, wanted to ensure that no other scholars were paid more than Einstein.

Below are the scientists for whom Adzuna reported a known salary and a modern-day equivalent, and what those scientists are best known for.

The website notes that the salaries vary widely partly because they are from different stages of the scientists’ careers.

For example, Einstein’s genius was well-established when he took a job at Princeton, while Isaac Newton’s teaching salary preceded his famous theory on gravity by 20 years.

We also converted Adzuna’s figures from British pounds to U.S. dollars for reference. (We used Google’s currency calculator.)

1. Albert Einstein (known for the law of relativity) — £122,560 ($177,641.53)
2. Alexander Fleming (discovery of penicillin) — £102,000 ($147,841.35)
3. Marie Curie (discovery of polonium and radium) — £33,086 ($47,955.68)
4. Rosalind Franklin (pioneering research into DNA) — £25,559 ($37,045.85)
5. George Washington Carver (agricultural discoveries and inventions) — £20,238 ($29,333.46)
6. Michael Faraday (discovery of electromagnetic induction) — £19,429 ($28,160.88)
7. Edwin Hubble (pioneering work in extragalactic astronomy) — £14,563 ($21,107.98)
8. Isaac Newton (law of gravitation) — £10,340 ($14,987.05)
9. Caroline Herschel (discovery of several comets) — £5,100 ($7,392.07)
10. Robert Hooke (law of elasticity, aka Hooke’s Law) — £3,102 ($4,496.12)

What’s your take on how much the salaries of Einstein and friends are worth today? Share your thoughts by commenting below or over on our Facebook page.