Footnote:

Einstein got notice of the preliminary results of the expedition on September 22, 1919, from a telegram of Lorentz. Lorentz told him that a value between 0.9 and 1.8 seconds of arc had been found for the deflection of light in the neighborhood of the sun. Einstein, whose general theory of relativity predicted 1.7 seconds, immediately saw this as an unofficial confirmation and informed the journalist Alexander Moszkowski, who published a famous article on October 8 in the Berliner Tageblatt, while asserting that Einstein’s theory had been proved beyond doubt. One thing that Einstein did not mention at the time, nor Mostowski repeated in his article, however, was that an alternative interpretation of the data was possible and that, indeed, it was still being considered by the British astronomers at the time. In the alternative  interpretation, the deflection of light would fit an earlier prediction made by Einstein himself in 1911, as part of a scalar theory of gravitation that he was then developing, and according to which the deviation would be of 0.87 seconds.

On these topics see David E. Rowe, "The Einstein Era, 1920-1955," in The Cambridge Companion to Einstein (forthcoming 2005).