The Patent Clerk

Every morning, a young man walked to an office in Bern, the capital of Switzerland, sat down at a desk and opened a pile of inventions.

They were applications for patents: new kinds of electrical switches, motors and machines. His job was to read each one, work out whether the idea really worked and was really new, and write a short, clear report. He was good at it, and fast. Sometimes he finished a day's work in a few hours.

Then, when nobody was looking, he would pull out a few sheets of paper from a drawer and go back to thinking about the universe.

His name was Albert Einstein, and in 1905, working at that desk and at home in the evenings, he would have the most extraordinary year in the history of science.

The boy with the compass

Albert was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in Germany, and grew up in Munich. When he was about five and ill in bed, his father showed him a compass. Albert was amazed that the needle always swung to point the same way, pushed by something invisible. He later said that this moment showed him there was something deeply hidden behind things.

He was a curious, independent boy who disliked schools where pupils were drilled to memorise. He taught himself geometry from a book, and at sixteen he wondered what it would be like to ride alongside a beam of light.

In 1900 he graduated from the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich, a famous university for science. But he had not always been polite to his professors, and none of them would give him a job as an assistant. For two years he wrote letters to universities all over Europe and got nowhere. He earned a little money as a private tutor.

The office in Bern

At last, in 1902, with help from a friend's father, he got a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, as a technical expert, third class.

It was not the life he had dreamed of. But it gave him a steady wage, time to think, and a habit of looking hard at an idea to see whether it truly worked. He married Mileva Marić, a fellow physics student, and in 1904 their first son, Hans Albert, was born.

In the evenings, Einstein met two friends to read and argue about philosophy and science over cheap suppers. They jokingly called their little club the Olympia Academy. And on his walks home, he talked through his ideas with his closest friend at the office, an engineer named Michele Besso.

The miracle year

In 1905, between March and September, Einstein sent four papers to a leading German physics journal, Annalen der Physik. Any one of them would have made a scientist's name.

The first, in March, was about light. Scientists believed light travelled only as smooth waves. Einstein suggested that light also comes in tiny packets of energy, which we now call photons. The idea explained a puzzling effect, in which light shining on metal knocks out electrons, and it helped to begin quantum physics.

The second, in May, was about why tiny grains, such as specks of pollen floating in water, jiggle about restlessly when seen through a microscope. Einstein showed that they are being pushed by invisible molecules of water. His calculations gave scientists a way to prove that atoms and molecules really exist, something still being argued about at the time.

The third, in June, was the one that would make him famous. It became known as the special theory of relativity. Einstein started from two simple ideas: that the laws of physics are the same for everyone moving steadily, and that the speed of light is always the same, however fast you are moving. From these he showed something astonishing. Time and space are not fixed. A clock that is moving very fast ticks more slowly, compared with one at rest. The paper did not list any references to other scientists, but at the end Einstein thanked his friend Besso for his help.

The fourth, in September, was only three pages long. It followed from relativity, and showed that mass and energy are two forms of the same thing. Later, Einstein wrote this as the most famous equation in the world: E = mc².

That same year, he also completed his doctoral thesis, on how to measure the size of molecules, for the University of Zurich.

Slowly, the world noticed

At first, there was no great fanfare. A few leading physicists, especially Max Planck in Berlin, read the papers carefully and saw how important they were. Gradually, letters began to arrive at the patent office for the clerk in Bern.

In 1909, Einstein finally left the office to become a university professor. In 1915 he completed his general theory of relativity, which explained gravity as the bending of space and time. In 1921 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, not for relativity, but for his 1905 paper on light.

Later he became the most famous scientist in the world, his wild white hair known everywhere. But the work that began it all was done by a young man with a desk job, a few good friends, and a habit of asking simple questions that no one else thought to ask.

Want to read more?

Walter Isaacson's Einstein: His Life and Universe is a lively, readable biography. Einstein's Miraculous Year, edited by John Stachel, gathers the 1905 papers with clear introductions. Abraham Pais's Subtle Is the Lord is the classic scientific biography, for readers who enjoy physics.