Dive into the life of Albert Einstein during his formative years at the Bern Patent Office. Discover the events that led to his revolutionary theories and his journey from obscurity to fame.
Before he became “the first and perhaps the only scientist who became a household name“, Albert Einstein lived in obscurity in Bern’s old town and worked as a “general dogsbody” for the national patent office. His life there is recorded in the city’s history museum, but it’s best evoked by some cramped rooms in the old town that have now become the Einstein House (Einstein-Haus). Peter Hulm visited it just before it closed for the winter holiday. It reopens on 1 February.
Einstein’s life was full of paradoxes. Our typical image of Einstein, for example, is a venerable old man whereas his scientific discoveries and theoretical ideas were published when he was young. And his 1915 theory of general relativity only passed its biggest challenge in late 2024.
Albert Einstein’s life in Switzerland, too, was full of paradoxes and challenges, which he handled with humour and geniality. He faced many difficulties in the Swiss federal capital between 1902-09 but later spoke of “those happy Bernese years”. In Bern he produced around 30 scientific papers as well as reviews. “During his whole life there was never a comparable time of creativity,” writes scholar Adolf Meichle.
Einstein first tried to make a home in Switzerland in the early autumn of 1895 at 16, riding the train from Milan to Zurich on the Gotthard train – and was an immediate failure.
He was seeking a place in the Federal Polytechnic (now the Swiss equivalent of MIT, the Federal Institute of Technology) through its entrance exam. But he failed the test in modern languages, zoology and botany.
In fact, he came to Switzerland as a child prodigy, as the Polytechnic’s Rector recognized. He had not only taught himself geometry and algebra. By the age of 12, Einstein had developed his own proof of the Pythagorean theorem. “From the age of 12 to 16 I taught myself the elements of mathematics, including the principles of differential and integral calculus,” he recalled.
Though it wasn’t recognized at the time, at 16 he had a thought which later led to his groundbreaking theory of special relativity: “Early one morning, after a good night’s sleep, he sat up suddenly in bed with the thought: two events that are simultaneous for one observer did not necessarily have to be simultaneous for another observer,” his friend Jakob Ehrat recalled.
This is how another biographer put the conundrum that would vex Einstein for 10 years from 16: What would a light beam look like if you could run alongside it? If light were a wave, then the light beam should appear stationary, like a frozen wave. Even as a teenager, though, Einstein knew that stationary light waves had never been seen. At that time Einstein also wrote his first “scientific paper” (“The Investigation of the State of Aether in Magnetic Fields”).
Einstein himself said: “During that year in Aarau the problem occurred to me: if you run after a light-wave at the speed of light, you would have a time-independent wave front ahead of you. But there doesn’t seem to be any such thing! That was my first childish thought experiment having to do with special relativity.”
The Polytechnic’s Rector advised 16-year-old Albert to take qualifying classes for the Institute at the Aargau Cantonal School. He had left Munich’s Luitpold Gymnasium (high school) as an average student without graduating in 1894. The child of Jewish parents, “at the age of 3 he still [couldn’t] speak properly,” you can learn from the commentary in the Einstein Museum. At school he also faced antisemitism from other pupils.
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its biography of the “German-American” physicist, reports: “At the Luitpold Gymnasium, Einstein often felt out of place and victimized by a Prussian-style educational system that seemed to stifle originality and creativity. One teacher even told him that he ‘would never amount to anything’.”
The Britannica piece by theoretical physicist Michio Kaku adds: “Einstein’s education was disrupted by his father’s repeated failures at business. In 1894, after his company failed to get an important contract to electrify the city of Munich, Hermann Einstein [originally a featherbed salesman and moderate success at running an electrochemical factory] moved to Milan to work with a relative. Einstein was left at a boardinghouse in Munich and expected to finish his education. Alone, miserable, and repelled by the looming prospect of military duty when he turned 16, Einstein ran away six months later and landed on the doorstep of his surprised parents. His parents realized the enormous problems that he faced as a school dropout and draft dodger with no employable skills. His prospects did not look promising.”
Because of his math scores, the Polytechnic accepted him if he finished his formal schooling. Albert’s Aargau studies, living with the Winteler family where the father ran the special school, enabled him to enter the Polytechnic in 1896. The family became closely linked to his life. It is reported his first love was Winteler’s daughter Maria. Einstein’s sister Maja married Winteler’s son Paul and his close friend in Bern Michele Basso married the Wintelers’ oldest daughter Anna.
In Aarau he was also able to indulge his passion for violin, first encouraged by his mother. “If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician,” he later declared. “I often think in music. I see my life in terms of music.”
With his family having fled from anti-Semitic oppression to Italy, Einstein gave up German citizenship that year, lived stateless in Switzerland for 5 years, and took Swiss citizenship on 21 February 1901, in Zurich. As a Swiss citizen he was liable for military service, but he declared unfit because of varicose veins, foot perspiration and flat feet.
At the Polytechnic he met and fell in love with an advanced student Mileva Malić, three years older, from a Serbian farming family, who came to Zurich to take advantage of Switzerland’s openness to women as university students. Einstein’s Jewish parents, however, “vehemently opposed the relationship” with an Eastern Orthodox Christian.
At the Polytechnic, Albert was described as a “good but not very disciplined student” who cut classes. He qualified for a certificate as a specialized teacher of mathematics in 1900. His marks were mediocre, and he was unable to find full-time employment after graduation, the museum notes.
Because of the anger of some of the Polytechnic’s professors at his behaviour, he was turned down for every academic position he applied to. Typically, he did not specify anti-Semitism as playing any role, but his biographers see it as a probable cause, since he was only newly a Swiss.
Einstein tried to make a living as a freelance private teacher. For a month he taught as an assistant at the technical school in Winterthur and in Schaffhausen at a private boarding school. The Bern University bio notes: “His independent spirit led to a confrontation with the school director […] ending in his flight to Bern”.
In 1901 Mileva left the Polytechnic without a certificate and returned home to what is now Serbia, giving birth to a daughter, Lieserl, in 1902 — a birth that remained hidden from public knowledge until 1986, 30 years after his death. Michele Zackheim, in her book on “Lieserl”, Einstein’s Daughter, writes that the infant had a developmental disability, and that she lived with her mother’s family and probably died of scarlet fever in September 1903.
After two years unsuccessfully looking for a proper job, Einstein arrived in Bern in the hope of an open position at the Federal Patent Office (officially the Federal Office of Intellectual Property). The father of a Polytechnic friend supported him in his application towards the end of December 1901. But an appointment was delayed. In the meantime, he advertised his lessons in the local paper, even offering a free trial. He was surviving mainly on 100 francs a month from an aunt in Italy.
His first home, in February 1902, was rented bachelor lodgings on the first floor of a house in the Bern Old Town’s Gerechtigkeitsgasse where he lived for around four months. A pupil of his at that time said Albert lived with only “a couple of chairs, a cupboard, a hard seagrass bed and a table upon which he could spread out his papers”.
Einstein then moved, probably in the hope of saving money, to an apartment on the “traffic-ridden” Thunstrasse in Kirchenfeld, the Bern University bio reports.
On 19 June 1902 the Patent Office offered him a provisional appointment as a technical expert, 3rd class, and he started work four days later, along with 12 other experts, at the lowest salary level. His provisional status lasted one year — typical conditions for the time, and Einstein reported he was able to live well on the 3,500 francs a year he received. But it took till 1906 for him to be promoted to the second class, while a colleague was appointed after only a year.
With the new job, Einstein moved his lodgings again on 14 August to an attic room at Archivstrasse 8 with a view of the Aare River and Swiss Parliament building.
In 1902, however, his father’s business went bankrupt, and in October 1902 Einstein’s father died in Milan. Shortly before, he had finally given his blessing to a marriage with Mileva (his mother was the person most against). Albert had gone along with his parents though he had abandoned the Jewish religion when still a teenager.
As cited by Michio Kaku Einstein wrote : “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages.…The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is.“
On 6 January 1903, with full-time work at the patent office, he married Mileva “Marity” (as recorded in the Bern marriage register) and took her home to Archivstrasse, but he had forgotten to take his key with him and apparently had to call on his renters to open up the attic apartment.
Four days after, they moved to Tillie Strasse 18 where they stayed for 10 months. But on their honeymoon, Mileva came down with flu, followed by Albert, which kept him out of work for a week, and two months later he fell ill with diptheria and a high fever.
Albert hoped to be able to teach at Bern University without a doctorate, but the university would not grant him permission to do so, and one result was that he had difficulty accessing the scientific articles he needed for his physics research because the libraries were closed when he finished his patent office work.
Mileva wrote: “Albert has 8 hours a day of very boring work.” He himself described it as “cobbler’s work”, the German for drudgework or a dogsbody’s job, and jokingly called himself “the respectable Federal ink pisser”. The Bern University book says: “Einstein’s new job at the patent office took up most of his time, at the expense of his private research.”
But his director at the Patent Office, Friedrich Haller, said in 1909 that Einstein performed “very valuable services. His departure is a setback for the Office”. Meichle writes that Einstein was “an unassuming man, and well-liked by both his colleagues and superiors there”. A coworker records: “He usually appeared at the office in green slippers with embroidered flowers.”
Karl Wolfgang Graff in the Bern University bio calculates that the Director expected staff to approve something like 20 patent applications a month, with an average of 15% more rejected or withdrawn. A 1930 biographer reported: “Albert was not used to sitting 8 hours over official duties which he could discharge with the same of faithfulness in 3 or 4.” So he started working on his scientific theories on small pieces of paper he could slip into a drawer when he heard someone approach.
The Swiss website for the Patent Office (IPI, with now 300 staff) said the inventions he examined “most likely included a machine for sorting gravel, a weather station that was influenced by humidity of the air, and an electric typewriter with shuttle-type carrier.” Einstein once described it as “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas”. (Inset: the most famous image of Einstein at the Patent Office using a standing desk).
To shorten Albert’s commute to his third-floor office near the Bern railway station at Speichergasse 6, the Einsteins moved in October 1903 to a tiny second-floor apartment up two steep flights of stairs at Kramgasse 49. Its arcaded street level had (and still has) a food and drink establishment giving on to the main road, 200m from the Zytglogge tower. Goethe in 1779 called it “the most beautiful street in the world”.
It was the Einsteins’ home only until May 1905. But it is where their first son, Hans Albert, was born in 1904, and where they lived when Einstein started his “miraculous year” (annus mirabilis) – 1905, when he published five scientific papers from March to September, including the one that earned him the 1921 Nobel Prize. However, their Kramgasse landlord died and on 13 May 1905, with an infant son to take care of, the Einsteins registered a new home out of town in Mattenhof at what is now Tscharnerstrasse. Nevertheless, just two days before their move, the Annalen der Physik received a paper from Einstein whose conclusion offered the first physical proof that atoms exist.
The Kramgasse building became the Einstein House in March 1979. It presents furnishing and décor typical for the time, with a baby’s cot and a square-patterned suit that matches the famous Einstein photo of him standing at his reading desk in the Patent Office. Rooms on the third floor present displays telling the story of his time in Bern. The desk Albert used in the Patent Office is the Museum’s reception desk. Entrance is the equivalent price of a coffee and croissant (Gipfeli). The ground floor offers a coffee lounge with an Internet connection.
A Tripadvisor visitor reported on the Internet in August 2024: “I thought it was cool to be in the house Albert Einstein lived in while in Bern. It’s unfortunate though they emptied the entire thing. It is quite small and can get hot in the summer. It’s a good thing to tick off the bucket list but manage your expectations. There are information boards on Einstein’s life. The staff is friendly.”
Tripadvisor has over 600 photos devoted to the house and the Bern Historical Museum, which itself has a separate hall devoted to Einstein’s seven years in Bern. A room at the Museum has showcases indicating the state of technology in 1905: a wood-pedalled dentist’s drill, mechanical typewriter, a coal-heated iron, and cog-wheels that make the Swiss Alps accessible by rail. In all it has 1000m2 of exhibition space devoted to him, with some “550 original objects and replicas, 70 films and numerous animations”.
At Kramgasse, Mileva handled most of their domestic life, while Einstein spent free hours with scientific friends they jokingly named the Olympia Academy. But Carl Seelig records him walking through Bern’s streets, stumpe (Swiss cheroot) in his mouth, rocking a pram containing Hans Albert while busily jotting down notes with a pencil stub in his right hand. The Bern University bio says such family duties were unusual for a father at the turn of the century. Adolf Meichle observes: “All year long he was seen walking through the streets of Bern in his green slippers – usually without socks. Every Saturday he went to the market to do the shopping, carrying his net or bag.”
Among his “academicians”, Michele Besso even moved out of the old town when the Einsteins made their home in Mattenhof, and found lodging in Sulgenau so that he could walk with Albert to and from work.
One reason for Mileva’s lack of participation in Einstein’s social life outside the home may have been because she suffered a hereditary condition that gave her a limp. But she played the tamboura (a Croatian string instrument), and sometimes Schumann on the piano, which Albert appreciated (he normally played second violin).
Her brother said she proofread Albert’s calculations and could read English for him. A friend of that time observed: “She was very witty and knew how to reduce the whole company to helpless laughter, staying completely serious herself.” She was also known as a loving mother who also enjoyed the frequent visitors to her husband.
At the Polytechnic she and Albert worked at one stage on a physics thesis together. She was the only woman to take the exam in 1900 to become a secondary school teacher (though her marks were not high enough to pass).
Albert also valued Mileva for her knowledge of botany, and together they visited the local Botanical Institute for meetings of the Bernese Scientific Society.
There were no reported signs of the strains that led to their divorce in 1919. As his fame spread later, however, Einstein was constantly on the road, speaking at international conferences, and deeply involved in his scientific theories. The couple argued frequently about their children and their meagre finances, their second son Eduard born in 1910 but became an unstable schizophrenic, and the couple separated in 1914, it is reported. Einstein began an affair with a cousin, Elsa Löwenthal, whom he later married. But when the divorce with Mileva took place, he agreed to give her any money received if he won a Nobel Prize.
In a private letter to Mileva, Einstein referred to “our theory.” This has led some to speculate that she was a cofounder of relativity theory. This is unlikely. Mileva abandoned physics after twice failing her graduate exams, and there is no record of her involvement in developing relativity. (Inset: the Historical Museum’s reproduction of the key paper).
In fact, in his 1905 paper, Einstein only credits his conversations with Besso in developing relativity. “I could not have found a better sounding board in the whole of Europe,” Einstein said of his Patent Office colleague. In 1905 he also submitted a paper for his doctorate.
Mileva later complained that her husband had put his science before his family, but Hans Albert said that when he and his brother were young, “father would put aside his work and watch over us for hours” while she “was busy around the house.”
A colleague Josef Suter was impressed that in Kramgasse Einstein refused to have his heating coal delivered and collected it from near the station himself in a small handcart. When Suter asked him why he was ready to carry the heavy sacks up the two steep flights of stairs, Einstein said: “Why shouldn’t I?” The money saved he donated to support Jewish orthodox refugees from Poland, arriving in unusually large numbers in Bern at that time to escape persecution (some 500). He spoke of Jews, whether religious or not, as his “fellow clansmen”.
Immediately after his wedding, Einstein tried to gain permission to teach as a private lecturer at the University of Bern without a doctorate under it special rules for those who produced “exceptional writings”.
In 1905 Einstein published four papers in the Annalen der Physik, “each of which would alter the course of modern physics”, while working 48 hours a week at the Patent Office, and the family visited Novi Sad to see Mileva’s relations. One observer recalled: “The casual way in which he used to carry his son on his shoulders through the streets of Novi Sad […] earned him the nickname ‘that crazy Maric son-in-law.”
The first paper of 1905 explained the photoelectric effect (photons) and eventually won him the Nobel prize. The second offered the first experimental proof of the existence of atoms. The third laid out the mathematical theory of special relativity. The fourth showed that relativity theory led to the equation E = mc2, the first mechanism to explain the energy source of the Sun and other stars, though don’t look for the equation in the Einstein Papers Project online at Princeton (now at the California Institute of Technology) covering the years 1900-1909.
As public broadcasting’s Nova TV channel explained: “If you could turn every one of the atoms in a paper clip into pure energy — leaving no mass whatsoever — the paper clip would yield [the equivalent energy of] 18 kilotons of TNT. That’s roughly the size of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945.”
The Papers Project comments: “One of the many implications of Einstein’s special relativity work is that time moves relative to the observer. An object in motion experiences time dilation, meaning that when an object is moving very fast it experiences time more slowly than when it is at rest.”
At first Einstein’s 1905 papers were ignored by the physics community, it is reported. This began to change after he received the attention of “perhaps the most influential physicist of his generation”, Max Planck, the founder of quantum theory. But in 1908, when he began teaching at Bern University, his lectures had only three listeners, and two of them were his friends.
In 1905 Mileva’s father also came to visit, bringing a bankbook worth slightly more than 100,000 francs (over 20 times Albert’s annual salary) as a belated dowry. Einstein refused the gift, saying “I did not marry your daughter for money”.
In January the University of Zurich granted him a doctoral degree. In March the Patent Office promoted him to technical expert 2nd class with a pay rise of 600 francs to 4,500 francs. Seelig reports his first reaction as: “But what I am supposed to do with all this money?” The family moved to a larger apartment in Kirchenfeld and remained there until the Einsteins moved to Zurich towards the end of October in 1909.
Einstein told “academician” Maurice Solovine, a Romanian natural philosopher who followed up on Albert’s newspaper ad for pupils: “The 3 of us are fine, as always. […] As for my science, not much is going on right now. Soon I’ll reach the stage of stagnation and sterility when one laments the revolutionary spirit of the younger generation” [he worked out his general relativity theory 9 years later].
He was appointed extraordinary professor of physics at Zurich University on 7 May 1909. He joked this made him an “extraordinary member of the guild of whores”. Mileva wrote to a friend: “I can’t tell you how happy we are about this change, that Albert will be rid of his 8 hours at the office every day and can now work to his heart’s content and exclusively on his beloved science.”
He was already being showered with honours while in Bern. His Polytechnic maths teacher was surprised. “Einstein used to be a real lazybones,” he said. “He didn’t pay any attention to mathematics.”
Einstein’s version was that mathematic specializations made him feel like the philosopher Buridan’s ass that, faced with two bundles of hay, couldn’t decide which to eat and died of starvation. “I have no special talents. I am only passionately curious,” Einstein declared, and this is the motto for the Papers Project, now with 17 volumes.
As for the 1921 Nobel Prize, it was announced at the end of 1922. The U.S. National Science Foundation explains: the Nobel Committee “was resistant to give Einstein the award for general relativity, which was still controversial. According to Nobel rules, the deferred prize meant they could reserve it for a year and still award another in 1922. In December of that year, the academy made two announcements: Einstein had won the 1921 award — for explaining the photoelectric effect, not relativity — and [Niels] Bohr took the 1922 award for his work on the structure of atoms.”
In his Nobel address Einstein provocatively spoke about relativity rather than the photoelectric effect, notes Michio Kaku.
Ann M. Hentschel, Gerd Grasshoff, with Karl Wolfgang Graff. 2005. Albert Einstein: “Those Happy Bernese Years”. University of Bern.
Adolf Meichle. 1993. Albert Einstein’s Years in Bern 1902-1909. The Albert Einstein-Gesellschaft, Bern.
Carl Seelig (ed.) 1952. Albert Einstein und die Schweiz. Europa Verlag.
Einstein House, Bern, open 1 February till 20 December 2025. Lectures in German: 21 March 18:30 and 20:00 Prof. Jürg Schacher, 21:30 Dr. Paul Burkhard.
The Einstein Museum in the Bernese Historical Museum.
Michio Kaku, Albert Einstein, Encylopaedia Britannica.
Vicky Stein. Einstein’s Theory of Special Relativity. space.com.
European Space Agency. Einstein Was Right – Euclid Just Captured Space-Time Warping in a Perfect Cosmic Ring. 12 February 2025. (LINK) “Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity predicts that light will bend around objects in space, so that they focus the light like a giant lens. This gravitational lensing effect is bigger for more massive objects – galaxies and clusters of galaxies. It means we can sometimes see the light from distant galaxies that would otherwise be hidden. Studying their gravitational effects can help us learn about the expansion of the Universe, detect the effects of invisible dark matter and dark energy, and investigate the background source whose light is bent by dark matter in between us and the source.”