gives a theatrical sigh. ‘If you insist.’
Albert recites Struwwelpeter in Latin:
The professor tells him: ‘You’re a fat little runt. You’ll be no good for anything. You’re a pathetic failure.’
‘Perhaps I will achieve your remarkable status in a field of my own discovery,’ Albert says with a smile.
‘Get out! Go home. Raus! Raus!’
Shortly afterwards Albert begins work on theorems in earnest, at home, proving them for himself.
Max Talmud, an impoverished Polish student of medicine at the university in Munich, is a regular Thursday night dinner guest. Albert intrigues Max. Max gives him books. Albert devours Aaron Bernstein’s Naturwissenschaftlichen Volksbücher (Popular Books on Natural Science) and Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff (Force and Matter). Bernstein and Büchner’s works capture Albert’s imagination, and Bernstein’s books in particular vastly increase Albert’s interest in physics.
Life in Munich changes abruptly when once more the Einstein business fails.
In 1894, when Albert is fifteen, the family elects to move to Milan because the Kochs feel they want a more direct influence on Hermann’s business activity. Hermann and Pauline take Maja with them, depositing Albert in a boarding house.
‘The plan,’ Hermann says, ‘is that you’ll gain your diploma at the Luitpold Gymnasium and enter university and then pursue the profession of electrical engineer.’ This, at any rate, is his father’s plan. Albert has other ideas.
He sends a paper to his uncle Caesar in Stuttgart.
‘I’m taking up the challenge of a highly disputed scientific subject,’ he tells his uncle. ‘This is the relationship between electricity, magnetism and the ether, the latter being the hypothetical entity that is non-material and believed to fill all of space and transmits electromagnetic waves.’
He writes out his thoughts in his thin Gothic script on five pages of lined paper. He entitles his study: ‘Über die Untersuchung des Ätherzustandes im magnetischen Felde’: ‘On the Investigation of the State of Ether in Magnetic Fields’.
‘Little is presently known about the relationship of magnetic fields with the ether,’ the fifteen-year-old points out. ‘But if the potential states of the ether in magnetic fields were to be examined in thorough experimental studies then the absolute magnitude of the ether, of its elastic force and density, might be begun.’
The boy has discovered an extraordinary paradox.
‘What might happen if you follow a light beam at the same speed as light travels? The result is a spatially oscillatory electromagnetic field at rest.’
He adds that ‘it is still rather naive and imperfect, as is to be expected from a young fellow like myself. I shall not mind if you don’t bother to read the stuff; but you must recognise it at least as a modest attempt to overcome the laziness in writing which I have inherited from both my dear parents.’
Albert has three more years to complete his studies at the Gymnasium before university.
He’s left behind to lodge with a relative and sinks into a depression. He turns to the family doctor and confesses he’s suffering from a serious nervous malaise.
Matters take a strange twist. Albert’s professor of Greek, Degenhart, tells him to leave the Gymnasium. Simple as that.
‘What’ve I done wrong?’ Albert pleads.
‘You’re a disruptive influence,’ the professor says.
‘Of course I’m disruptive. I don’t approve of your educational methods.’
‘Then leave.’
‘You don’t want to hear my arguments?’
‘I do not.’
‘Your reluctance makes my point.’
He packs his things and follows the rest of the family to Milan.
The lack of a really settled formal education secretly suits Albert. Simply, it leaves him to his own devices, immersed in thought. He is someone apart: single-minded. In one essay, ‘Mes Projets d’Avenir’ (‘My Plans for the Future’), he confesses he has no ‘practical talent’. Yet, ‘There is a certain independence in the profession of science that greatly appeals to me.’
He can’t accept the German soul, as it seems to be embodied by the likes of Degenhart. Of course I’m disruptive.
Worse still, Germans are required to undertake military service. There’s one way out. Get out of the country well before my seventeenth birthday and renounce my citizenship. Otherwise I’ll be arrested for desertion.
He takes the train to Pavia, thirty-five kilometres south of Milan, where his parents will have no alternative but to welcome him.
He loves travelling on the Schnellzug: the express train. He listens to the sound of the slamming doors heralding departure. He savours the smell of coal-generated steam, the engines panting, screaming whistles. The clackety-clack, diddley-dum, diddley-dum of the wheels on the wrought-iron rails. The dancing sparks of burning grit. The driven rain coursing down the windows. The sight of the enormous Munich marshalling yards and Hagans Bn2t locomotives. Slag heaps. In winter: blackened snow, barns and old lime trees. In spring: orchards in bloom. In high summer: cornfields like silver, Alpine pastures, trees of pine, golden harvest hay. Over the points. His journeys alone afford him time to think without interruption. He shuts his ears to the gabble of fellow passengers, lost in the ideas swirling around in his brain to the rhythm of the train.
Meine Gedankenexperimente. My thought experiments.
On the journey to Pavia he reads Mozart’s letter to his father: ‘A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent (which without impiety I cannot deny that I possess) will go to seed if he always remains in the same place.’
I must not remain in the same place.
THE WORKSHOP OF ELEKTROTECHNISCHE FABRIK J.EINSTEIN & CO., PAVIA, 1894
The Einsteins exhibit dynamos, lamps, and even a telephone system at the first international electro-technical exhibition in Frankfurt. The Einstein firm is issued with several patents.
Now called the Elektrotechnische Fabrik J. Einstein & Co., the firm employs 200 people and starts installing lighting and power networks and is awarded the contract to install the electric lighting for the Oktoberfest. Then the firm wires Schwabing in northern Munich. Jakob’s dynamos are shown at the International Electrical Exhibition in Frankfurt, generating 100 horsepower, 75,000 watts. A million people, along with the Kaiser, marvel at the lights. They gain contracts to instal power in the northern Italian towns of Varese and Susa.
Unfortunately, upwards of a million marks is needed to compete in the burgeoning market for power plants. The Einsteins face massive competition from Deutsche Edison-Gesellschaft and Siemens.
