About

The meme is basically an exploitable photograph of world-renowned theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein, writing on a chalkboard wherein which the shooper alters whatever it is Einstein is writing on the board.

Origin of Photograph

Excerpt from CBC.ca:

Dr. Albert Einstein writes an equation for the density of the Milky Way on the blackboard at the Carnegie Institute, Mt. Wilson Observatory headquarters in Pasadena, Calif., in this Jan. 14, 1931, file photo.

Memetic Origins

On June 5, 2001, a site called Hetemeel.com, a generator site that creates templates for exploitable images and photographs and documents several examples of the memes, created a template for the Einstein Blackboard meme, simply referred to as "Einstein", using a cropped version of the original photograph:

When people started discovering this exploitable from coverage on several blogging sites (see next heading for a few example blogging sites which talked about the generator), the meme exploded even greater and nowadays, it is possible to find over 9000 shooped variations of the meme on the internets.

Coverage on Some Blogging Sites

• JoeSchmidt.com
• The Generator Blog
• Bilvet 2.0
• AstroRoach