14th March: Albert Einstein

Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879. Here are some things you might not know about him:

1. It's often said that he failed maths as a child, giving hope to slow students. However, it wasn't true. Einstein was brilliant at maths at school and claimed to have mastered differential and integral calculus by the time he was 15. The story may have originated from the fact he was fairly average at other subjects, which meant he did fail a university entrance exam which tested him on all round ability. He also didn't learn to speak until he was four.
2. He was a bit of a rebel at school and later at the Zurich Polytechnic. He disliked the way he was taught, and skipped classes. This meant when he graduated and needed to get a job, he didn't get glowing references from his tutors. Unable to get a job in academia for this reason, he took a regular job at the Swiss patent office in Bern. It was fairly menial office work, but Einstein could do the work very fast, leaving him with time on his hands. In the time most of us might have spent looking at social media, he spent time researching and writing. It was during this time that he came up with his famous equation E=mc2 and the theory of special relativity.
3. If he hadn't been a scientist, he would have been a musician. His mother had him take Violin lessons from the age of five. Although he didn't like the lessons at first, he grew to love music later and played until his later life.
4. Another of his favourite hobbies was sailing - even though he never learned to swim.
5. He hated wearing Socks, because they'd get holes in them, and avoided socks whenever possible.
6. He was married twice. The first time was to a fellow student in Zurich, called Mileva Maric, who came from Serbia. They married after graduation and had two sons, although Einstein's papers revealed much later that they also had a daughter, a year before they married, and nobody knows what happened to her. Einstein never spoke about her. It's not known whether she died in infancy or was given up for adoption in Serbia. He wasn't a great husband, according to recently discovered evidence. Not only did he have affairs and not bother to hide them, he even made Mileva sign an agreement full of conditions which made her more of a servant than a wife. Things like making sure three meals a day were delivered to his study, keeping it tidy, and renouncing any chance of intimacy with him unless required for social reasons. Unsurprisingly, they divorced in 1919. Mileva did better out of the separation agreement, since Einstein promised her any money he might get from his Nobel Prize as well as an annual allowance. Admittedly, he hadn't won the Nobel Prize yet so it might not have seemed such a great thing at the time, even though he was confident he'd win one one day. Meanwhile, he'd moved to Berlin and taken up with his cousin, Elsa, who became his second wife and remained so until she died in 1936.
7. Talking of Nobel Prizes, you'd think he'd win it for relativity, wouldn't you? Nope. He won it for his work on the photoelectric effect.
8. He was under surveillance by the FBI for 22 years. They suspected him of being a spy for the Russians, due to his support for socialism and civil rights. They even thought he might be building a death ray. His phone was tapped, his mail intercepted and opened, and they even went through his bins. 22 years and 1,800 report pages later, they hadn't found anything.
9. He could have been president of Israel. Einstein was Jewish and while not religious, he valued his heritage and campaigned against anti-Semitism. When Chaim Weizmann died in 1952, the Israeli government offered Einstein the job of replacing him. Einstein declined on the grounds that he did not think he had the necessary aptitude for politics or dealing with people.
10. We don't know what his last words were. When he was dying from an abdominal aortic aneurysm in 1955, he said something as he lay on his deathbed, but unfortunately the only other person in the room didn't speak German and didn't understand what he said. After his death, the doctor who performed the autopsy stole his Brain and eyeballs. He studied the brain, and discovered Einstein's brain weighed less than average, but a later study found he had unusual folds on his parietal lobe, a part of the brain associated with mathematical and spatial ability. Einstein's eyeballs are in a safe deposit box in New York, where they were placed by Einstein's ophthalmologist and friend, Henry Abrams.

Bonus fact: ‘Albert Einstein’ is an anagram of ‘Ten elite brains’.

See also:
Quotes by Albert Einstein

Quotes about the Theory of Relativity

I Write Fiction, Too!

More details about my books. Follow this link if you like Superheroes, Psychics and/or quirky short stories. 

I've listed the themes each novel touches on here for easy reference.

Like my author page on Facebook for news on new books and blog posts.

Follow me on Twitter and Pinterest

Check out my Writing blog