Why Einstein Couldn’t Get a Job for Nine Years

How did a patent clerk who couldn't get a job teaching become the most famous scientist of all time? Albert Einstein faced numerous setbacks throughout his life before becoming the superstar scientist. As a child, he was so slow in learning to talk that his parents, Herman and Pauline Einstein, consulted a doctor. Einstein credited his delayed development with fostering his genius as he approached abstract concepts like space and time later in life. In his words, Consequently, I probed more deeply into the problem than an ordinary child would have. Although he finished at the top of his class in primary school and high school, he hated the German education system's emphasis on mechanical learning, the memorization, drills, and force-fed facts, and likened his teachers to lieutenants in the Prussian army. At 16, he decided to leave high school in Munich to study on his own, hoping to get admission to By leaving Germany and renouncing his citizenship, he also avoided compulsory military service, which began at 17, a prospect that filled the pacifist with dread. And yet, he faced an early setback. He failed to get into college. He passed the science and math sections of the entrance exam but failed French, literature, zoology, botany, and politics. So he had to spend a year at a high He appreciated the Swiss education's focus on visual learning, which later played a key role in fostering his famous thought experiments. He scored the second highest grades in his class, and this time, he passed the entrance exam to enroll at Zurich Polytechnic, in the specialized math and physics teaching stream. His grades in university were good, but not spectacular. On a scale of one to six, six being the highest score, he received mostly fours in his math courses, especially in geometry, but fared better in his physics courses, scoring fives and sixes, with the exception of a one he received in his third year physics practical course for beginners. Professor Jean Pernet gave him the lowest possible grade for barely showing up to class. When he did show up, and Pernet gave him written instructions for an experiment, Einstein threw them in the trash because he wanted to do things Although Einstein initially got along with his other physics professor, Heinrich Weber, he later expressed his disdain for Weber's failure to cover contemporary material, including Maxwell's groundbreaking theories on electromagnetism. Einstein's behavior would hurt him when he searched for a job as a teaching assistant. Professor Weber detested Einstein so much that when no graduates of the physics and math departments were available to become his assistant, he decided to hire two students from the engineering division instead of Einstein. Einstein was the only student in his cohort who didn't receive a job offer. Amidst this setback, he found solace in the company of a fellow classmate. Mileva Maric was the only woman in his program. Despite her plain looks and a birth-related hip issue that caused a limp, Einstein was drawn to Mileva's mind. Mileva double-checked the math in his famous theories and encouraged him in his scientific pursuits. Einstein expressed his dependence on her this way, Without you, I lack self-confidence, pleasure in my work, pleasure in life. In short, without you, my life is not life. However, Einstein's parents strongly opposed the relationship. When he told his mother of his plan to marry Mileva, she threw herself on the bed, buried her head in the pillow, and wept like a child. This added pressure to Einstein's already challenging task of finding a job, especially after Mileva became pregnant. Einstein kept the pregnancy a secret from his own family. Their daughter Lizarel was born in Mileva's parents' house in Novi Sad, Serbia on January 27, 1902. An excited Einstein wrote to Mileva, I love her so much and don't even know her yet. Yet, Einstein never laid eyes on his daughter. What happened to the infant remains a mystery to this day. Einstein and Mileva destroyed most of their letters that mentioned her. As Walter Isaacson put it in his biography on the genius, Einstein and his wife did all they could, with surprising success, to cover up not only the fate of their first child, but her very existence. One possibility is that she was adopted by Mileva's close friend, Helen Savage. We do know that Lizarel contracted scarlet fever at 19 months. Whether she survived remains unclear. Einstein promised to marry Mileva as soon as he found a stable job. He told his friend and classmate, Marcel Grossmann, I leave no stone unturned and do not give up my sense of humor. God created the donkey and gave him a thick skin. Einstein reached out to Wilhelm Ostwald, a professor of chemistry in Leipzig, who would later earn a Nobel Prize, inquiring if he needed an assistant. When he heard nothing, he followed up with another letter. I'm not sure whether I included my address in the earlier correspondence. Still, no response. Einstein's father stepped in and wrote a heart-wrenching letter to Ostwald without his son's knowledge. Please forgive a father who is so bold as to turn to you, esteemed Herr Professor, in the interest of his son. My son, Albert, is 22 years old. He passed his diploma examinations in mathematics and physics with flying colors last summer. My son, therefore, feels profoundly unhappy with his present lack of position, and his idea that he has gone off the tracks with his career and is now out of touch gets more and more entrenched each day. Since it is you, highly honored Herr Professor, who my son seems to admire and esteem more than any other scholar currently active in physics, it is you to whom I have taken the liberty of turning with a humble request to write him, if possible, a few words of encouragement. If, in addition, you could secure him an assistant's position, my gratitude would know no bounds. I remain highly esteemed Herr Professor, your devoted Hermann Einstein. Despite this moving letter, there was still no reply. Einstein felt his failure to get a job must have been due to Professor Weber giving a poor reference. He also believed that his Jewish heritage may have played a role amid the prevalent antisemitism of the time. To make ends meet, he started tutoring on the side, but those jobs were scarce. Eventually, Einstein gave up looking for a job in academia. Two years after graduating, Einstein finally landed a job as an examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, thanks to a recommendation from his friend Marcel Grossman, whose father knew the director. Einstein was grateful for his friend's help, writing, I was deeply moved by your devotion and compassion, which did not let you forget your luckless friend. Although examining patents seemed far removed from his scientific pursuits, they had a lot in common. His boss's credo was to question everything. In a similar way, Einstein meticulously visualized how a scientific theory might unfold in practice, questioning its implications and assumptions. Einstein found that he could get through a full day's work in two to three hours, leaving the rest of his eight-hour shift six days a week to pursue his scientific ideas. As he confessed, whenever anybody would come by, I would cram my notes into my desk drawer and pretend to work on my office work. The patent office served as a creative sanctuary for him, a worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas. Sadly, his father would not live to see his beautiful ideas. Hermann Einstein would only ever see his son as a third-class patent clerk as he passed away in October 1902. Hermann did grant permission for his son to marry Mileva. They married in a civil ceremony on January 6, 1903. Only Einstein's two close friends from his informal study group attended. No family members from either side showed up. While working as a patent clerk, Einstein came up with four radical papers that changed our understanding of the universe. The first, published in March 1905, explored the energy properties of light. While physicists viewed light as a wave, they struggled to explain how it could generate an electric current. Einstein proposed a revolutionary idea. He suggested that light consisted of a stream of particles called photons, which could knock an electron off an atom to create a current. This insight became known as the photoelectric effect. The following month, in April 1905, he introduced an innovative method to measure the dimensions of molecules and indirectly provided compelling evidence for the existence of atoms. Einstein adopted a cautious approach to this paper as it was part of his PhD thesis, and he had previously struggled to get his dissertation accepted. In May, Einstein's third paper addressed a mystery observed by Scottish botanist Robert Brown 77 years earlier. Brown had noticed pollen particles in water wiggling under a microscope, later termed Brownian motion. Scientists were puzzled by what was happening. Einstein theorized that water is made up of small atoms that can't be seen with a standard microscope, which caused the particles to jiggle. His final paper, published in June, was the most significant of the four. He introduced his theory of special relativity, which explored the special cases of objects moving at a constant velocity. Central to this theory was the idea that time and space are perceived differently depending on one's reference frame. To illustrate this concept, Einstein devised a thought experiment involving a train moving past a platform. He imagined a scenario where lightning strikes both ends of the moving train. A person standing in the middle of the platform sees both strikes simultaneously. However, a passenger inside the moving train experiences the events differently. Due to the moving toward the lightning strike at the front of the train, the light from this strike reaches the passenger first. As a result, the passenger observes the front strike before the rear strike, despite both strikes occurring simultaneously for the person standing on the platform. This highlights the relativity of simultaneity. Events may appear simultaneous to one observer, but not to another, depending on their respective reference frames. Einstein was so exhausted writing this paper that his body buckled and he went to bed for two weeks, while his wife pored over his work and also helped himself some mathematical problems. Einstein actually published a fifth paper in September, an addendum to his work on relativity, introducing the equation E equals mc squared. This equation shows that energy and mass are interchangeable. The speed of light is a very large number, and when you square it, it becomes enormously huge. So a small amount of mass results in a vast quantity of energy. If one gram of water were converted into pure energy, it would be equivalent to the energy produced by a large nuclear explosion. Following his miraculous year, one might have expected Einstein to quickly secure an academic position. Yet, no offers came his way. Einstein's sister recalled, he was bitterly disappointed. Icy silence followed the publication. Einstein found solace in playing the violin, particularly Mozart, which he believed reflected the elegance of the universe. Music also helped him think when faced with scientific challenges. His son Hans Albert said, whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road, he would take refuge in music, and that would solve all his difficulties. Einstein was so desperate for a teaching job that he answered an ad for a math and geometry teacher at a high school in Zurich, but he failed to make the final three cut. Although he did manage to secure a junior teaching position at the University of Bern, it didn't pay enough for him to leave his job at the Patent Office. It was nine years after graduating that his career finally took a turn in the right direction. In 1909, Alfred Kleiner, the physics professor at the University of Zurich, who had helped Einstein obtain his PhD, hired him as an associate professor. This marked the beginning of a series of teaching positions in Prague, back to Zurich, and then in Berlin. Despite his childhood disdain for the German education system, Berlin's status as the epicenter of theoretical physics proved irresistible. The city also personally intrigued Einstein, as it was where his cousin Elsa lived. Einstein found himself drawn to Elsa, who was the complete opposite of his wife, lacking in scientific inclination, yet Einstein appreciated her nurturing nature. As Einstein became increasingly successful, Mileva became increasingly resentful, especially because her scientific dreams had been shattered when she failed her college exams. She felt that she and their two sons took a back seat to Einstein's career. Elsa pleaded for Einstein to marry her, which meant he had to divorce his wife. To incentivize Mileva to divorce him, Einstein daringly proposed that if she granted him a divorce and he eventually won the Nobel Prize, he'd give her the prize money. She thought for a week and accepted. Mileva had to wait 17 years until Einstein was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 for his discovery of the photoelectric effect. Surprisingly, he wasn't awarded the prize for his most famous theory, general relativity. Einstein developed his theory of general relativity because he recognized that his special relativity did not account for gravity, as described by Newton's theory, or acceleration. The realization struck him this way. I was sitting in a chair in the patent office at Bern when all of a sudden a thought occurred to me. If a person falls freely, he will not feel his own weight. He expanded on this thought by imagining someone in an elevator. If the elevator is in free fall, the person inside would not feel their own weight because they and the elevator are accelerating downwards at the same rate. If the elevator accelerates upward, the person feels heavier as the floor pushes against their feet, creating a sensation of increased weight similar to a stronger gravitational field. From inside the elevator, it is impossible to tell whether this sensation is due to the elevator accelerating upwards or increased gravity. This made Einstein realize that the effects of acceleration and gravity are indistinguishable, known as the equivalence principle. He called it the happiest thought in my life. So Einstein proposed that gravity is not merely a force, but rather a distortion of space-time caused by mass. In this framework, planets orbit the sun not because they are being pulled by the sun's gravity in the General Relativity also predicts that gravity bends light, altering the apparent position of stars so that they differ from their actual locations. This was confirmed during the 1919 solar eclipse when the moon blocked the sun's bright light, allowing astronomers to observe that stars appeared shifted from their known positions, exactly as Einstein had predicted. This confirmation of General Relativity propelled Einstein to worldwide fame. The world needed something to cheer about after the brutality of World War I. Einstein and his electric white hair toured the US and the world, with crowds attracted to both his mind and his humanity. Einstein very vocally stood against racism, militarism, and nationalism. But like all humans, Einstein could be full of contradictions. The man who once decried racism as a disease of white people expressed xenophobic sentiments in private, writing in his travel diaries that the Chinese were industrious, filthy, obtuse people. It would be a pity if these Chinese supplant all other races. For the likes of us, the mere thought is unspeakably dreary. Despite advocating against militarism, he proposed the idea of a world federation that should include some form of an armed force in order to prevent wars. While denouncing nationalism, Einstein supported the establishment of a Jewish state amid the surge of anti-Semitism in post-World War I Germany. When the Nazis raided his beloved summer cottage in Kaput, a village in Brandenburg, he vowed never to return to Germany. On October 17, 1933, he immigrated to America, where he faced a less than warm welcome from authorities. The FBI compiled 1,427 pages of documents on him due to concerns about his connections to various groups and individuals considered communists. While the feds were preoccupied with his affiliations, Einstein harbored concerns of a different nature. He was worried that Germany might possess the capability to build an atomic bomb, prompting him to sound the alarm in a letter to President Roosevelt, urging the U.S. to initiate its own atomic bomb project. Although he never directly participated in the Manhattan Project, Einstein became associated with the bomb's development because his equation E equals mc squared provided the theoretical foundation for the immense energy released in nuclear reactions. Upon learning that the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Einstein's response was a simple yet profound, oh my god. Einstein spent the remainder of his career at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. During his time at the prestigious research institute, he made it his mission to find a theory that could fully explain how the universe worked. Despite not believing in a personal god, Einstein embraced the idea of a divine order underlying the universe, reflected in the orderliness of nature. He believed that quantum mechanics, while groundbreaking, was incomplete as it left aspects of reality to chance and introduced probabilistic principles. He was particularly troubled by the strange phenomenon called quantum entanglement, in which two particles instantaneously influence each other no matter how far apart they are. If one photon in a connected pair is observed to be yellow, the other is instantly determined to be yellow as well. If one photon is observed to be red, the other is also red. The particles could be light years apart and still influence each other. Though this is a simplified example, in reality quantum entanglement deals with properties like polarization or spin, not colors. Einstein aspired to discover a comprehensive theory that would explain all phenomena in the universe. When a colleague asked him why he would embark on such a lonely endeavor, Einstein said it was worth it, however small his chances. Even on his deathbed, Einstein was scribbling away, attempting, in vain, to find a unified theory of everything. Just before he died of an aneurysm at the age of 76, a nurse heard him blurting out a few words in German that she couldn't understand. Einstein passed away on April 18, 1955. Beside his bed were 12 pages of equations, a testament to his lifelong struggle to unlock the secrets of the universe. Einstein's unwavering pursuit of knowledge inspires us to delve deeper into the mysteries of the universe, and to embark on this journey of discovery, you need the right skills and knowledge. Well, Brilliant recently launched a ton of new interactive content in math, science, data science, programming, and AI, and it's free for you to try out. One of my favorite lessons is on how LLMs, large language models, work. This immersive AI workshop lets you explore how LLMs generate text that's indistinguishable from human writing. If you're interested in programming, you can familiarize yourself with Python and start building programs on day one with the built-in drag-and-drop editor. I really like that Brilliant lets you play with concepts. It's way more effective than watching lecture videos. There's something for everyone, whether you're starting out on your STEM journey, or would like to brush up on what you already know. You can try Brilliant for free for 30 days by clicking my custom link in the description, brilliant.org slash Newsthink, or by scanning the QR code on your screen. If you sign up with my link or code, you'll get a 20% discount on Brilliant's annual premium subscription, which gives you unlimited access to their thousands of interactive offerings. Thanks for watching. For Newsthink, I'm Cindy Pom.