1 Without any indication he was destined for something great, Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879. In fact, his mother thought Albert was extremely unusual. At the age of two-and-a-half, Einstein still wasn’t talking. When he finally did learn to speak, he uttered everything twice.
2 Einstein did not know what to do with other children and his playmates called him “Brother Boring.” Because of that, the youngster played by himself much of the time. He especially loved mechanical toys and looked for them everywhere he went. Looking once at his newborn sister, Maja, he is believed to have said, “Fine, but where are her wheels ?” Einstein began learning to play the violin at the age of six because his mother believed it was important. He later became a gifted amateur violinist, maintaining this skill throughout his life.
3 Unfortunately, that awkwardness extended to school as well. A headmaster at one of his early schools once told his father that Einstein’s profession wouldn’t matter because, “he’ll never be successful at anything.” But Einstein was not a bad pupil. When he was fifteen months old, his family moved to Munich,Germany.
There, he went to high school and earned good grades in almost every subject. He hated the strict school environment though, and often clashed with his teachers. At the age of 15, Einstein felt so stifled there that he left the school for good. He then took the entrance exams for college and although he failed some, his scores for Physics and Math were so good, they let him into the school.
4 In 1900, at the age of 21, Albert Einstein was a college graduate and was employed. He worked as a teaching assistant and gave private lessons on the violin before finally getting a job as a technical expert in Bern’s patent office. While he was supposed to be paying careful attention to other people’s inventions, he was secretly developing many ideas of his own.
5 One of his famous papers, published in 1905, was Einstein’s special Theory of Relativity. This theory had to do with time and distance not being absolute. His theory explained that two perfectly accurate and synced clocks would not continue to show the same time if they came together again after a journey where one traveled at a faster speed than the other. From this theory followed the world’s most famous formula which described the relationships between mass and energy:
E = mc2
6 In 1915, he published his General Theory of Relativity, which provided a new idea of gravity. An eclipse of the sun in 1919 brought proof that his theory was accurate. Einstein had correctly calculated, in advance, the extent to which the light from fixed stars would be deflected through the sun’s gravitational field. The newspapers proclaimed his work as a ‘scientific revolution.’
7 Einstein received the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1921. He was showered with honors and invitations from all over the world and applauded by the press.
