Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein Biography
Albert Einstein was born into a non-observant Ashkenazi Jewish family on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, a city on the River Danube in what was then the Kingdom of Württemberg, part of the German Empire. It is now in the German state of Baden-Württemberg. His parents were Pauline Koch and Hermann Einstein, who was an engineer and a salesman.
Not long after Albert was born, in 1880, the Einstein family moved to Munich, where Hermann and his brother Jakob founded a company which manufactured electrical equipment. From the age of five, Albert attended a Catholic school in Munich and transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium three years later. He continued his primary and secondary education there for the next seven years.
In 1894, the Einstein family was forced to relocate again due to the failure of Hermann and Jakob’s business. They headed to Italy, first to Milan and then to Pavia, but Albert stayed behind in Munich to complete his studies. He became increasingly frustrated with the gymnasium’s method of teaching, though, and clashed with the authorities there. So, when the family moved to Pavia, he joined them in December 1894.
The following year, at the age of sixteen, Albert Einstein sat for but failed the entrance exam for admission to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. It was noted, however, that the general studies part of the exam performed poorly, whereas his performance on the physics and mathematics parts was excellent. So, he became a pupil at the Argovian cantonal school in Aarau, where he completed his secondary education.
In January 1896, to avoid military service, Albert Einstein renounced his citizenship of the Kingdom of Württemberg. In September of the same year, he passed the Swiss high school exit exam, the Matura, with passable grades. At the age of seventeen, he enrolled in a four-year teaching diploma program in physics and mathematics at the Zurich Polytechnic.
During his time in Zurich, Albert Einstein also met his future wife, Mileva Marić, who had enrolled on the same course. In 1900, Einstein was awarded his diploma, but Mileva failed the mathematics portion of the exam.
After graduating, Einstein sought a teaching position. In 1901, he became a Swiss citizen and took a job as an assistant examiner, level III, at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property, where he evaluated patent applications. After searching for a teaching post for two years and failing to find one, the patent office job became permanent in 1903.
Letters between Albert Einstein and Mileva, discovered in 1987, reveal that the couple had a daughter in 1902 while Mileva was staying with her parents in Novi Sad, Serbia. However, when she returned to Switzerland, she came without the child, and its fate is unknown, but it is believed she was either adopted or died of scarlet fever.
Albert Einstein and Mileva Marić were married in January 1903, and in May 1904, their first son, Hans Albert Einstein, was born in Bern, Switzerland. Eduard, their second son, was born in Zurich in July 1910. The family moved to Berlin, but it was to become apparent that Albert had fallen in love with his first cousin, Elsa. Mileva moved back to Zurich, and after five years apart, they divorced in February 1919. The same year, Albert Einstein and Elsa were married.
On 30 April 1905, he completed his thesis with his pro forma advisor Alfred Kleiner and a dissertation entitled “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions”, and was awarded a PhD from the University of Zurich. In the same year, which would become known as his “miracle year” or “annus mirabilis,” Einstein, at the age of only 26, published four papers that brought him to the attention of the academic world. The four papers covered the photoelectric effect, the equivalence of mass and energy, Brownian motion and special relativity.
From this point on, his star began to rise, and by 1908, he had been appointed lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, he was appointed an associate professor in theoretical physics. In 1911, he was made a full professor at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Prague, accepting Austrian citizenship in the process. In 1912, he returned to Zurich and became a professor of theoretical physics. Two years later, he returned to the German Empire, where he was appointed director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics and a professor at Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1916, the German Physical Society appointed him as its president.
In 1919, Albert Einstein gained worldwide recognition when calculations he had made in 1911, which predicted that light from another star would be bent by the sun’s gravity, were observed and confirmed during a solar eclipse.
In 1921, Einstein visited the United States and visited New York City and Washington, and spent three weeks giving lectures, including ones at Columbia and Princeton Universities. Following his trip to the USA, he visited London and gave a lecture at King’s College. Also in 1921, he was approached by Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organisation, to help raise funds for a planned Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He did so, and the university opened in 1925 with Einstein as one of its first members of the Board of Governors.
In 1922, Albert Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics and toured Asia and visited Palestine during the same year. In 1925, he received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society.
In December 1930, Einstein and his wife, Elsa, visited the USA for a second time, this time keeping his visit as low-key as possible. He was invited to lecture and speak at various events, but he turned them all down. During his trip, he visited New York’s Chinatown and took part in a Hanukkah celebration at Madison Square Garden. He also visited California, where Carl Laemmle, Head of Universal Studios, introduced him to Charlie Chaplin, and the two instantly became friends.
After another visit to the United States in 1933, Albert Einstein and Elsa returned to Europe by ship, arriving in Antwerp, Belgium, on 28 March, where he learned that their home had been raided by the Nazis. Einstein knew that he could not return to Germany due to the rise of the Nazi party and its leader, Adolf Hitler, and so went to the German consulate, handed in his passport and renounced his German citizenship.
Einstein first lived in Belgium for a short while before moving to England, where he met Winston Churchill and former British Prime Minister David Lloyd George. He asked for their help to get Jewish scientists who had been banned from working in German universities out of Germany. Churchill immediately did so, finding positions in British universities for many.
In 1935, however, Albert Einstein decided that America was where he wanted to be, and so he moved there and became a member of the Institute for Advanced Study, attempting unsuccessfully to develop a unified field theory.
In July 1939, he was approached by physicists Leó Szilárd and Eugene Wigner, who explained their ideas about atomic bombs and their use, as well as the fact that they believed the Nazis were actively trying to make one. They believed it was their duty to ensure that America was aware of the prospect, but so far, they had been unsuccessful. They asked Einstein to use his influence to help, which he did by signing a letter to President Roosevelt, who subsequently threw every resource he could at what would become the Manhattan Project. Shortly thereafter, in 1940, Albert Einstein became a naturalised American citizen.
Albert Einstein was passionately involved in the battle to combat racism in the United States, which he referred to as its greatest disease. He joined the NAACP and campaigned for civil rights. In 1946, he visited Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and was awarded an honorary degree from what was then a historically black college. In 1951, he offered to testify as a character witness on behalf of the civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, and as soon as he did so, the judge dismissed the case.
In 1948, Albert Einstein underwent surgery to reinforce an abdominal aortic aneurysm, but on 17 April 1955, it ruptured, causing internal bleeding. He refused further surgery and died at Princeton Hospital the next morning. He was 76 years old.
Throughout his life, Albert Einstein published more than 300 scientific papers and over 150 non-scientific works. He also published hundreds of articles and books. His name has become synonymous with the word ‘genius’. In 2014, 30,000 unique documents written by Einstein were released by various universities and archives, providing scientists with ample work to do if they are to figure out what made Einstein tick.
Albert Einstein FAQ
Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist best known for developing the theory of relativity, one of the two pillars of modern physics. He is often regarded as one of the most brilliant minds in history.
The theory of relativity includes Einstein’s special and general theories. Special relativity introduced the famous equation E = mc², and general relativity revolutionised our understanding of gravity, space, and time.
Yes. In 1921, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, not for relativity, but for his explanation of the photoelectric effect, a crucial development in the evolution of quantum theory.
Beyond his scientific achievements, Einstein became a global symbol of intellect and humanism. He spoke out on civil rights, pacifism, and nuclear disarmament, and his work continues to shape modern science and philosophy.
[this article originally appeared on 5MinuteBiographies.com on 7 March 2019]
