Chapter One
Childhood and Youth
1879 to 1895 From birth to age 16
Albert Einstein was born on March 14, 1879, in Ulm, Germany, with a swollen,misshapen head and a grossly overweight body, causing his grandmother,Jette Koch, to wail, "Much too fat! Much too fat!" His alarmed parents,Hermann and Pauline, consulted the doctor, who assured them that time wouldheal the deformities, and he was right. Within months everything had becomenormal, except for the back of Albert's skull. That always remained unusuallyangular.
But for his parents the worrying was not over, as Albert's speech was late indeveloping. What in fact happened is in dispute. Einstein maintained he madeno attempt to talk until he was past three, and his parents feared that he wasmentally retarded. His explanation was that he consciously skipped baby babbling,waiting until he could speak in complete sentences. He stuck to this accountthroughout his life, responding to an inquiry by his biographer, Carl Seelig,in 1954, as follows: "My parents were worried because I started to talkcomparatively late, and they consulted a doctor because of it. I cannot tell youhow old I was at the time, but certainly not younger than three."
His version of the facts is contradicted in a letter written by his doting maternalgrandmother, Jette. After she and her husband, Julius, visited the Einsteinswhen Albert was just two years, three months old, she wrote: "He was so goodand dear and we talk again and again of his droll ideas." How could he haveconveyed droll ideas without speaking?
Albert's sister, Maja, supports their grandmother. Presumably using her parentsas the sources, Maja reports that before her birth on November 18, 1881,when Albert was still four months shy of three, he had been promised a newbaby to play with. Evidently expecting a toy, he greeted her appearance with adisgruntled "Where are the wheels?" Not bad for a "backward" two-year-old!
Albert was certainly a late and reluctant talker, but not nearly as late as herecalled. He clearly hoarded his words, doling them out at rare intervals to afavored few: the child equivalent of an introspective adult who shuns small talk.
The Einsteins had many relatives in southern Germany, but Albert neverknew his paternal grandparents. Hermann's father, Abraham Einstein reputedlya decent, intelligent man, and his unremarkable wife, Hindel, from Buchau onthe Federsee, both died while Albert was an infant. His maternal grandfather,Julius Derzbacher, an enterprising and hardworking small-town baker fromCannstatt, adopted the family name of Koch and made a fortune in the graintrade. He and his brother were partners, and they and their families shared ahouse. As Maja remembered it, "Their wives [also] shared the cooking, eachtaking charge of it . . . in weekly turns, If such an arrangement is rather rare, andnot only in Germany, theirs was all the more remarkable because it lasted fordecades without any friction."
While Albert was an infant, his generally imperturbable father was preoccupiedwith the family's foundering electrochemical business. Hermann'sbrother and partner, Jakob, suggested a way out--that they jump ship before itsank. Why stay in a backwater? Ulm's only distinction then was a cathedralboasting the country's biggest organ. Less than a hundred miles away Munichbeckoned, the fast-growing political and intellectual capital of southern Germany.The dynamic, ambitious younger brother painted a not altogether fancifulpicture of the vibrant metropolis with its sophisticated population crying out tobe converted from gaslight to electricity. Hermann was persuaded.
So the Einsteins moved from their modest apartment in Ulm to a large,welcoming house, which they shared with jakob, in a shady, tree-filled gardenon Munich's outskirts. The brothers added plumbing to their electrochemicalenterprise and planned to use their profits to mass-produce and market a dynamoJakob had recently invented.
Despite their early concern, the Einsteins hardly coddled their firstborn,giving him unusually early training in self-reliance. We have his sister's word forit that before Albert was four his parents encouraged him to roam the neighborhoodand even to cross the local streets on his own. The first few times theywatched surreptitiously to ensure that he looked both ways before crossing. Afterthat he went solo. True, the traffic was mostly horse-drawn carriages, but a childof four at large in the streets was certainly at risk.
Munich did provide the Einstein brothers with more business opportunitiesthan Ulm, but it also teemed with fierce competitors. Once again the brothersran into trouble. Hermann faced it with characteristic calm. He appeared toregard a financial emergency as an immutable law of nature and was confidentthat things would work out in the end, or that his wife's wealthy father, Julius,would fling him a lifeline.
Even though the business was shaky, Pauline decided it was time to imbueAlbert with her passion for music: she bought a fiddle and hired a teacher. Albertresisted, throwing a chair and a tantrum--which sent his teacher scurrying forthe nearest exit. She never came back. Pauline persisted and hired a replacement.Albert was still liable to express his discontent with the nearest weapon at hand,but the new teacher was made of sterner stuff than the first, and the lessonscontinued under duress.
On the rare occasions when Albert mixed with children his age, he wasquiet and withdrawn--the onlooker. Relatives thought of him as a dear littlefellow who never joined in the other children's squabbles, except to separate thecombatants. His younger sister knew the other Albert, the little hellion with awild temper, and she bore the brunt of his ferocity. Maja escaped serious and frequent injury because she could detect the onsetof his rages--his face turned yellow--and would run for cover. His color changewas not a foolproof warning signal, however. Once she barely missed getting aconcussion from a bowling ball Albert aimed at her bead. The next time his faceturned from pink to yellow, either her luck ran out or she wasn't watching. Heclosed in for the attack and smashed Maja over the head with a garden hoe.Years later, when her brother was a dedicated pacifist and literally wouldn't swata fly, Maja quipped, "A sound skull is needed to be the sister of a thinker."
The "thinker" suddenly emerged from the junior Jekyll and Hyde whenAlbert was five and ill in bed. To keep him amused, his father gave him a magneticcompass. Instead of throwing it at his sister, Albert shook it and turned it,hoping to catch it unawares. He was both intrigued and puzzled by the compass.What invisible force, he wondered, always made the needle point north? Itseemed like a mechanical homing pigeon with a built-in direction finder. Hegrappled with the enigma for a long time, trying to discover the answer forhimself
Two years later when he began elementary school, his teachers, far fromrating him a thinker, revived early fears that he was mentally retarded. Perhaps)shis mother was partly to blame for having had him tutored at home until he wasseven. She had proudly accepted the tutor's inflated assessment of Albert as awhiz kid. By prolonging his isolation from other children she had helped tocreate a misfit, the odd boy out, which he was inclined to be in any case.
Classmates regarded Albert as a freak because he showed no interest insports. Teachers thought him dull-witted because of his failure to learn by roteand his strange behavior. He never gave a snappy answer to a question like otherstudents, but always hesitated. And after he had answered, Albert silently movedhis lips, repeating the words.
This was obviously his way of coping with the required rote learning. Teacherspunished wrong answers with painful whacks on the knuckles. To avoid thepain and humiliation, Albert played for time until he could conjure up the properreply. After giving it, he silently checked himself to make sure he'd got it right,and perhaps to ensure he wouldn't forget it.
Those school days were a taste of things to come. He ignored whatever boredhim, making no attempt to master it; but if something caught his interest, heembraced it with the purposeful concentration of a watchmaker. Once, for example,his sister Maja watched him slowly and carefully build a house of cards.She had seen others do it and tried it herself, but these houses never reachedmore than four stories before collapsing. Her brother stuck at it until his houseof cards grew to an astonishing fourteen stories.
After two years in elementary school, Albert had shown a talent both formath and for Latin; he liked the latter because it was logical. He was hopelessat everything else and was subjected to angry complaints and painful knuckleraps, which he bore with a faint grin.
One bright spot in the week was Thursday. That was the day when, followinga traditional charitable practice of European Jews, the Einsteins hosted a poorstudent for lunch. At this time, the beneficiary of this practice was Max Talmud(later Talmey), a medical student, who regularly (and for years) joined the familyfor lunch. As a result, what Albert missed in school he more than made up forat the Thursday lunches. Sensing the youngster's intellectual hunger, Talmudfed him tidbits of the latest scientific breakthroughs, recommended groundbreakingscientific authors, and discussed mathematics and philosophy as if he andAlbert were contemporaries.
Albert flourished in this atmosphere and showed his prowess when UncleJakob turned up for the lunchtime seminars armed with tricky math problems.When he solved them, Albert yelled triumphantly like a soccer player scoringan unlikely goal. jakob had a way with words and got Albert interested in algebraby describing it as "a merry science in which we go hunting for a little animalwhose name we don't know. So we call it X. When we bag the game we give itthe right name."
At twelve, now in high school, Albert had his first encounter with geometry.In later life he was to describe his discovery of Euclid as one of the great delightsof his life and refer to a book on Euclidean geometry as "holy." (He had vividrecall of such early events. It was personal details, he said, that eluded him.
Meanwhile, God waited in the wings. The Almighty was at best a shadowyfigure in the Einstein household, where both parents were agnostics. They occasionallydiscussed Jewish traditions with their relatives. But if the subject oforganized religions came up, Albert's father dismissed them all with derisiveimpartiality as ancient superstitions.
The only Jew in his overwhelmingly Catholic class, he felt neither uncomfortablenor singled out, For example, he didn't take it personally when, in ashow-and-tell attempt to enliven religious instruction, the teacher held up a bignail and compared it with those used to crucify Christ. Albert simply thought itwas a botched attempt to arouse sympathy. Discussing the event as an adult withhis friend and biographer Philipp Frank, Einstein speculated that such a vividportrayal of brutality was more likely to arouse latent sadism than pity for victimsof cruelty. The crucifixion aside, he enjoyed learning about Christianity. It remindedhim of Jewish traditions occasionally mentioned at home and gave hima comforting sense of living in a caring, harmonious world.
The state required that Albert be instructed in his faith. Even though bothparents were without religious convictions, he had to be taught Judaism becauseof his Jewish heritage. This was easier said than done, as no one in his school orhome was equipped for the task. Eventually a distant relative came to the rescueand was spectacularly successful,
To say God stepped out of the shadows understates the case. The Almighty,dazzled Albert. All aglow, the twelve-year-old abandoned his devotion to mathand science for the wisdom of Solomon and the ethics of his religious forefathers,all in the worshipful service of the Master of the Universe. Religious ecstasyconverted him into an extrovert who composed songs in praise of God, whichhe belted out as he walked to and from his high school, the Luitpold Gymnasium.His bemused, indulgent parents took it in their stride, though they resistedvigorously when he tried to shame them into giving up pork.
A year later, faith lost out to reason. Albert was lured back from his impassionedproselytizing to the fascination of science and philosophy. With his parents,Uncle jakob, and friend Max Talmud rooting for him, Albert tried out hisintellectual wings. At thirteen, he began to study higher mathematics on his own,along with the intricate suppositions of Immanuel Kant--tough going at any age. Kant--the tiny, fragile eighteenth-century philosopher--proposed some bizarreideas, such as that all planets have been or will be inhabited. Moreover,he peppered his discourse with snappy asides like a stand-up comedian--panningpompous philosophers, for example, as those who live on the higher towers ofspeculation where there is usually a great deal of wind." His comments on timeand space--that they are not products of experience but concoctions of ourminds which clothe our sense perceptions--reinforced Einstein's alreadyaroused interest in the subject.
At his most daring, Kant suggested that God might not exist. This idea enragedGod-fearing Germans, especially clergymen, prompting some to nametheir dogs Kant. Ironically, having his name shouted all over the country providedgreat free publicity for the eccentric philosopher. Kant soon recanted, however,conceding that God was at least a possibility. Einstein reversed the process, firstbelieving as a child, then doubting in a personal God for the rest of his life. Heagreed with Kant about many things, however, including that the way to endworld wars was through a world government.
Though Einstein abandoned his uncritical religious fervor, feeling he hadbeen deceived into believing lies, he never lost his admiration for the ethicaland aesthetic aspects of some Christian and Jewish teachings. Attaching himselfto no sect, repulsed by the rigid rules and compulsory behavior dictated by mostorganized religions, he was still considered by those who knew him to have beendeeply religious. They cite his almost childlike wonder at the splendors of theuniverse and his belief in its ultimate harmony, his concern for the fate of others,and his active commitment to social justice. They also mention his frequentallusions to a cosmic intelligence.
Philosophy and science were not the only enthusiasms to replace Albert'sbrief, enraptured encounter with organized religion. Herr Reuss, his literatureteacher at the Gymnasium, introduced him to the works of such authors asSchiller, Shakespeare, and Goethe--all of whom became enduring favorites ofhis. (At home, Albert's father sometimes read those same writers aloud to theassembled family after dinner.) Reuss was one of the few teachers Albert liked,especially because he never demanded rote learning.
Against the odds, his Years of enforced, mechanical violin lessons had madeAlbert a music addict. In time his violin became a near-permanent attachment,like his pipe. No one rejoiced more than Maja, who spent many evenings listeningto her mother and brother play duets, mostly Mozart and Beethoven sonatas.After mastering the violin, Albert took up the piano, becoming so adept, Majarecalled, that he "constantly searched for new harmonies and transitions of hisown invention." He also used music as a study aid. More than once Maja witnessedhim solve a problem after a session on the violin or piano. He would play,then suddenly stop and cry out, "There, now I've got it!"
If only he could have solved his father's business problems with a few barsof music. Tough competition and Hermann's free-and-easy management stylehad doomed the Munich enterprise, The brothers hadn't cleared enough evento market Jakob's newly invented dynamo.
As the optimistic Hermann had anticipated, however, his wife's relativescame to his aid. The wealthy Kochs in Genoa offered to back him and Jakob inanother venture, also installing electric lighting. There was one string attached,It would mean a second move, this time out of the country, from Germany toItaly. There the investors could keep a close watch on their investment and curbHermann's overgenerous impulses toward others in trouble. The offer was accepted,although it meant leaving Albert alone in Munich.
Now fifteen, he would soon be subject to the draft. The law required all fityoung German males to complete military service before they could leave thecountry, so Albert had to stay behind to finish high school and then to tote arifle. The rest of the family, Uncle Jakob included, traveled south across theborder for a new life in Milan, Italy, near the new factory in Pavia.
Reluctantly, Albert moved from his comfortable home with its large, tree-filledgarden to a lonely and solitary existence in a boardinghouse. There wereno friends to share his after-school hours, and his only visitor was a distant relativewho looked in on him occasionally. He wrote regularly to his family but gaveno hint of a growing depression. School had become a dread prospect. He wentin trepidation to face teachers who barely tolerated him and schoolmates whokept their distance. They treated as a curious outcast this healthy male who neverkicked a ball, would sooner read than run, and was less than eager to serve inthe army.
Greek was his biggest ordeal. His failure to grasp it had so exasperated theteacher that he conducted the class as if Albert weren't there. Sitting at the backof the room, Albert didn't always catch what was said and probably wouldn't haveunderstood it anyway. Bored and uneasy, aware of the teacher's animosity, he justsat there, smiling slightly. Whether the smile was the grin-and-bear-it variety orderisive is uncertain, but it turned the teacher's tongue from Greek to plainGerman, in which he told Albert that he would never amount to anything, thathe was wasting everyone's time, and that he should leave the school immediately.When Albert protested that he had done nothing wrong, the teacher complained,"But you sit there in the back row, smiling, And that udnermines the respect ateacher needs for his class."
In fact, Albert longed to fulfill the Greek teacher's wishes, During a visit tothe family doctor for a minor illness he discussed the situation, unable to hidehis desperation. Albert Einstein was never the calm, imperturbable Buddha-likecharacter of popular myth. At fifteen, he was both high-strung and emotional,and felt abandoned. The doctor recognized this and gave him a to-whom-it-may-concernletter, warning that unless Albert was allowed to recuperate with hisfamily he might suffer a complete breakdown.
To strengthen his hand, Albert showed the doctor's letter to a math teacher--onthe face of it a bad choice, because the teacher was one of the few who wouldhave liked Albert to stay. Nevertheless, he too saw that Albert was sick with worry,and sympathized with his plight. He wrote a note saving that Einstein was soproficient at math there was little more he could teach him.
Albert took these possible passports to the school principal and they did thetrick. He was free from-school and the country. Had he waited until he wassixteen he would have first been required to complete his military service beforejoining his family abroad.
If he had in fact been heading for a breakdown, the family reunion in Italywas the cure. Maja had never seen him in such high spirits. He soon had acoterie of friends. Yet he had arrived at a bad time. His father was struggling toget the new business off the ground and hardly welcomed the added burden ofa school dropout. They constantly argued over Albert's future. For now he seemedhappy to drift aimlessly, stirring himself only to visit Milan's museums and artgalleries or to explore the countryside with his newfound friends.
When pressed, Albert said that he might eventually consider teaching philosophy,Kant especially. This was too much for his harassed father, who ridiculedthe "philosophical nonsense" and pushed for a practical job such as electricalengineering. They were doubtless too emotionally upset to appreciate the ironythat Hermann was advocating a trade rapidly taking him down to financial ruinfor the third time.
Albert put up a strenuous fight, saying that even the thought of a practicaljob was unbearable. He clung to his dream of teaching philosophy, although itwas impossible without a degree, and as a high-school dropout he had spoiledany chance of attending a university. Without further education only practicaljobs were open to him, and the best of those required technical college training.He needed a college diploma even to teach in high school.
Hermann finally prevailed, persuading Albert to bear the unbearable and toapply to a technical college for a course in electrical engineering. Albert set hissights high-on the Zurich Polytechnic, a Swiss technical college with an internationalreputation. Its other big attraction was that he had merely to pass theentrance exam; he wouldn't have to finish high school. Meanwhile, finallymoved by his father's plight, he agreed to help out at the family's failing business.
Maja was astounded by the change in her brother in just six months. Thenervous, withdrawn dreamer had become an amiable, outgoing young man witha tart sense of humor. Was it the Italian air? The warmhearted people? His escapefrom purgatory?
What hadn't changed was his laserlike ability to focus on whatever held hisinterest, On social occasions, when the living room was filled with conversationand music, Albert brought pen, ink, and notebook to the party rather than shuttinghimself up in his room to study. Maja was amused to see him squeeze himselfonto the sofa, balance the inkwell on the armrest, then set to work apparentlyoblivious of all distractions,
His favorite uncle, Caesar Koch, proudly displayed an essay Albert hadmailed to him describing a proposed experiment to determine if electricity, magnetism,and the ether were connected. In those days, the ether was thought tobe a rarefied and invisible element permeating all space. Einstein's essay showedoriginal thinking, even though experiments later demonstrated there was no suchthing as the ether.
When not studying for the college entrance exam, Albert kept his word andhelped out at the family business. There his Uncle Jakob and an assistant engineerhad been stymied for hours over calculations needed to solve a technicalproblem. Albert offered to try his hand. He had the answer in fifteen minutes.Jakob enthusiastically seconded Caesar in predicting Albert's great future.
These lofty predictions only compounded the shock when Albert flunkedthe entrance exam to Zurich Polytechnic. He had been floored by French, chemistry,and biology, subjects he had neglected through lack of interest, Despite this traumatic failure, his uncles were not alone in detecting Albert'sunusual talents. Heinrich Weber, the Polytechnic's professor of physics, was soimpressed with Albert's high scores in math and science that he invited him toaudit his lectures. And Albin Herzog, the college principal, noting that at sixteenAlbert was two years younger than most taking the exam, took that into considerationand promised to admit him the following year. Albert wouldn't even haveto take the exam again. He just had to get a high-school diploma from any schoolof his choice. Failure had turned into near triumph.
Continues...
Excerpted from Einsteinby Denis Brian Copyright © 1997 by Denis Brian. Excerpted by permission.
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