 Extraordinary public clamor greeted an announcement of the joint meeting of the Royal Society of London and the Royal Astronomical Society on the sixth of November 1919. Astronomical observations made by a British team during the solar eclipse on May 29 comprised the first empirical test of Einstein’s general theory of relativity. Lengthy data analysis of the observations over the summer had shown that within acceptable margin of error, light from distant stars passing near the solar surface was displaced by the tiny amount (1.75 arcseconds, corresponding to the angle of a right triangle of height 1 inch and base nearly 2 miles in length) predicted by Einstein’s gravitational theory of curved spacetime. By dint of having “overthrown” such a permanent fixture of the cognitive landscape as Newtonian gravitational theory, the general theory of relativity at once became a principal focus of philosophical interest and inquiry. Although some physicists and philosophers initially opposed it, mostly on non-physical grounds, surveyed here are the principal philosophical interpretations of those accepting the theory as a revolutionary advance in physical knowledge. Even so, these include positions ill-informed as to the mathematics and physics of the theory. Further lack of clarity stemmed from the scientific literati who provided differing, and at times, conflicting mathematical or physical accounts of the theory’s fundamental principles. These are (see below): the principles of equivalence and of what Einstein misleadingly termed “general relativity” (i.e., general covariance), and finally one he baptized as Mach’s Principle, of the complete relativization of inertia. In one or another form, these controversies have largely continued into the present literature of physics and philosophy of physics (see, e.g., Stachel 1980; Friedman 1983; Norton 1993; Barbour &amp; Pfister 1995; Ohanian 2008; Janssen 2014; Ryckman 2017). This is not unusual: physical theories, if sufficiently robust, are rarely, if ever, without ambiguous or problematic aspects, and are often taken to say different things at different stages of development. But the very fluidity of physical and mathematical meaning lent interpretative latitude for inherently antagonistic philosophical viewpoints seeking vindication, confirmation or illumination by the revolutionary new theory. Perhaps only semi-facetiously, Bertrand Russell observed that