As you may know in this Almanac we are not dealing with births and deaths. We made an exception for Steve Jobs, to tell what happened in his life before he became Steve Jobs, aged 21, with the founding of Apple. Today we make the second for Albert Einstein who was born on March 14, 1879 in the medieval town of Ulm in southern Germany. As with Jobs, we do this to try and figure out who Einstein was before he became Einstein.
We do it thanks to a funny booklet released a few years ago entitled “Kid Scientists: True Tales of Childhood from Science Superstars”, true childhood stories of science superstars. The book explains that Einstein was a disappointment to his family from the moment of birth. Grandmother seeing him said he was too fat, and the mother, Pauline, was bewildered by the shape and size of the baby’s head. But Albert was perfectly normal, as his growth in the following months showed, apart from one non-trivial detail: he was very slow in learning to speak. The parents turned to a specialist and found that he did indeed have a “learning disability, a learning difficulty “.
At the time it was thought that if a person spoke little, there was something wrong, and it seems that the maid had started calling little Albert “the Depressed”, The fool. According to a family legend, Albert broke his silence one evening at the table exclaiming: “The soup is too hot!” moving the parents who, after the sudden joy, asked him why he hadn’t spoken earlier, and he would have said: “Because everything was fine”. This seems like a legend, more likely the first sentence addressed to the little sister Maya when he was two years old is true: “Where are the wheels?”. He thought it was a toy.
Years passed and Albert is described as a child with frequent outbursts of anger perhaps due to his difficulty in speaking (and often his little sister, who is actually very much loved, paid the price). At school he calmed down but was still a problem student: it is said that he was often lost in his thoughts, unable to follow the current lesson. He enjoyed asking difficult questions to his teachers, to see them wrong; and he was generally so disobedient that a teacher of his once told him that he wouldn’t do much in his life. His mother then tried music, and organized a violin course for him, but Albert found it very boring and found a way to get rid of the musician.
But instead something caught his attention: a compass that his father – who ran a small technical equipment business – gave him when he fell ill for a few weeks. With the compass he discovered magnetism and the fact that there are hidden forces in the world that influence the rest: “It was a fundamental experience” he will say years later. Also because it led him to discover the language with which to express his concepts: mathematics. He was just 10 years old and solved very complex problems. He began to devour books on physics and philosophy: “The more he learned, the more he wanted to learn.” He also rediscovered music: now that he had discovered that he had a connection with mathematics, he resumed violin lessons. When he was 14, fed up with what he did at school, he decided to join his father who in the meantime had moved to Italy hoping to earn more. He then completed school in Italy before going to Switzerland to do university. Twenty years later he will receive the Nobel Prize in Physics.