Early Years: Ulm to the Patent Office

Ulm and Munich

Albert Einstein was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in the Kingdom of Württemberg in southern Germany, to Hermann Einstein and Pauline Koch. The family was Jewish and not observant. The following year they moved to Munich, where Hermann and his brother Jakob ran a firm that built electrical equipment. A sister, Maja, was born in 1881; the two were close all their lives.

By the family's account he was slow to begin speaking. Two childhood experiences stayed with him. At about four or five he was shown a compass, and was astonished that the needle obeyed something invisible. He later wrote that it gave him the sense of something deeply hidden behind things. At about twelve he was given a small book of Euclidean geometry, and the certainty of its proofs made an equally strong impression.

His mother, a pianist, started him on the violin at about six. He resented the lessons until, in his early teens, he discovered Mozart's sonatas. After that he played for the rest of his life.

A Difficult Student, Not a Bad One

Einstein did well at school, particularly in mathematics, which he taught himself well ahead of the curriculum. What he hated was the rote learning and military tone of the Munich Gymnasium. When the family business failed in 1894 and his parents moved to Italy, he was left behind to finish. He lasted a few months, then left without a diploma and joined them.

In 1895, two years younger than the usual age, he sat the entrance examination for the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. He did very well in mathematics and physics and fell short in the general subjects. On the principal's advice he spent a year at the cantonal school in Aarau, a liberal, relaxed place that he remembered with affection. It was there, at sixteen, that he first asked himself what a beam of light would look like if you could run alongside it.

He renounced his German citizenship in 1896, partly to avoid military service, and was stateless for five years.

Zurich

At the Polytechnic, later known as ETH, he trained as a teacher of mathematics and physics. He skipped lectures he found dull, studied the original works of the great physicists on his own, and relied on the meticulous notes of his friend Marcel Grossmann to pass examinations. His independence irritated his professors. One told him that he was clever, but had one great fault: he would never let himself be told anything.

Among the handful of students in his class was Mileva Marić, a Serbian woman studying physics. The two became a couple. He graduated in 1900. She did not pass the final examinations.

Unemployed

Every other graduate in his section was offered an assistantship at the Polytechnic. Einstein was not. For two years he scraped by on temporary teaching and tutoring, writing to professors across Europe without success. He became a Swiss citizen in 1901.

Grossmann's father recommended him to the director of the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. The post was advertised in December 1901, and in June 1902 he was appointed technical expert, third class. That year his father died, and his daughter Lieserl was born. He married Mileva in January 1903.

The Patent Office

The job turned out to suit him. Examining applications for electrical devices trained him to find the essential point of an idea and to spot what was wrong with it. He could finish a day's work quickly and turn to his own calculations.

In the evenings he met two friends, Maurice Solovine and Conrad Habicht, to read and argue about philosophy and science. They grandly named themselves the Olympia Academy. With another friend from the office, Michele Besso, he talked physics on the walk home.

That was his situation in the spring of 1905: twenty-six years old, a civil servant with no doctorate, and no academic post. See Special Relativity for what happened next.