According to
various reports from the time, the young Einstein was hardly marked out as
being a potential genius. Indeed, some historians believe that he was rather
slow at learning how to speak much to the disdain of his mother and father who
were believed to have been concerned at how their child was apparently not
developing in the normal manner. Little did they realize that their child would
evolve into one of the sharpest brains that the world has ever seen.
When it comes to
his physicality at this age, then there are suggestions that his head was
larger than normal for a boy of his age. This physical difference, along with
the way in which he rarely spoke, led to a housekeeper believing that he was
perhaps 'retarded' in some manner whereas we now know that the complete
opposite is true. However, this point is interesting as it does help to show
that he was certainly never viewed as being anything special from an early age.
**
Between 1901 and
1903 Einstein was largely struggling and in 1902 he reached what would become
his lowest ebb when the business run by his father collapsed and he found
himself trying to work as a tutor for children. However, he was apparently even
being fired from these positions perhaps because his heart was not in this
aspect of teaching. We are also aware of him being given a teaching position,
but only for two months, at a Technical College at Winterthur which only really
served to give him a taste of the type of life that he had initially wanted to
lead.
His fortunes did
eventually take a turn for the good in the later part of 1901 thanks to his old
university friend Marcel Grossmann. Through this one single contact, he was put
forward for a position in Bern, Switzerland where he would work as a clerk in
the Swiss Patent Office. This in itself was not the kind of position that he
had initially wanted to find himself in, but after several years of feeling
like a failure it was clearly something that he wished to take advantage of so
was quite happy to take up the position. He began his career at the patent
office in the middle of June 1902 and it would go on to be the start of
something quite wonderful for him, but not in the way that he had expected. For
Einstein, getting this job was important although it did mean that he was
ranked the lowest of the low within the office. It took him some time before he
could be promoted from the third level to the second level and to then be paid
a slightly higher salary. Considering his excellence in certain subjects this
was certainly an inauspicious start in life.
This high point
of at least getting a job was also matched by a low point in his life as his
father became very ill and then died. It is known that Einstein suffered a
great deal from his death as he struggled to come to terms with the idea that
his father had effectively died believing that his son was a failure. Quite how
that then affected the rest of his life is unknown, but there is no doubt that
it did depress him a great deal for some time.
**
When we look at
Einstein it is important for us to remember that he was purely a theoretical
physicist. In other words, he merely sat and worked out theories using nothing
more than pen and paper with others then being set the task of either proving
or disproving what he said.
However, Einstein
is viewed in higher regard than most. He is seen as having had a unique way of
being able to look into the workings of the universe in a unique way. He was
not merely an abstract thinker, but rather he saw ideas within the universe
that were concrete and he then sought to turn them into an explanation that
could be understood by everybody.
The remarkable
thing about Einstein was that he seemed to just have the ability to identify
clear problems with physics and could then set about trying to resolve them. He
was able to visualize the different steps that he was required to follow in
order to get to an adequate solution. His vision, as well as the fact he saw
his own advances as merely being a stepping stone onto something else. He is
seen as being rather humble even though he was able to completely change the
way in which the universe was viewed.
**
To Einstein the
idea of peace was easy to understand. To him, it should have been obvious that
humanity had to be more important than the aims and intentions of individual
nations. However, he also foresaw a problem in that it was pointless waiting
for leaders of nations to give up their ideas surrounding war as he believed
that this would be difficult to achieve. Instead, change had to come from the
people as numbers talk and that would ultimately lead to nations being forced
into changing their approach. In his mind, it was puzzling how people that
claimed to be upstanding members of humanity could engage in war when they knew
that so many innocent people would be killed. This was a tragedy beyond any
description and it was an approach that even the great mind of Einstein was
unable to comprehend.
