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Patent Applied For. For two years Einstein earned a wretched living by tutoring. Then he got an obscure job as patent examiner in the Bern patent office. He worked there for seven years. They were among his most productive, theoretically. Scribbling his ideas on scraps of paper, which he thrust out of sight whenever a supervisor approached, Einstein developed his Theory of Special Relativity, which he published without fanfare under the modest title: On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies.
Relativity had been born, and among scientists the patent clerk was already famous. Soon he became a lecturer at Bern University, then extraordinary professor of physics at the University of Zurich. He taught for a year at the University of Prague, and in the most medieval city in Europe continued his development of the General Theory of Relativity (published in 1915).
One year before World War I, Max Planck (Quantum Theory) used his influence to have Einstein appointed professor at Berlin's Academy of Sciences. One of his duties was managing the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physical Research. Since Einstein would not relinquish his Swiss citizenship, the Prussian Government gave him honorary citizenship.
The American. After Hitler came to power, Einstein went first to Belgium and England, then to the U.S. In 1940 he became a U.S. citizen. In the U.S. he has continued to work on his Unified Field Theory, which he hopes will bridge the gap between his Relativity Theory and the Quantum Theory, thus producing a universal law of nature. There is a story that as he was crossing the Princeton campus one day with Dr. Abraham Flexner, head of the Institute for Advanced Study, Einstein said: "I think I am on the verge of my greatest discovery." A few weeks later he asked Flexner: "Do you remember that I told you that I was about to make my greatest discovery?" "Yes," said Flexner, "I wonder how I restrained myself from asking you what it was." "Well," said Einstein, "it didn't pan out."
In Princeton, Einstein lives with simplicity in a prim, box-shaped frame house, with a wistaria vine shrouding the front porch. Until her death in 1936, his second wife (and cousin), Elsa, was the female Fafnir who guarded his peace, seclusion and his household accounts. It was Elsa who managed his swelling correspondence (20 letters on dull days, hundreds in season), kept off nosy newshawks and curious neighbors. The Einsteins loved music but did not approve of jazz. One neighbor, a friendly woman who was a great chess enthusiast and had heard that Einstein was too, dropped in to offer to play. "Chezz!" cried Elsa Einstein, who spoke English with a pronounced accent
—"There shall be no chezz in this house."
Einstein works in an austerely simple room with no instrument but a pencil. He has never made a, laboratory experiment, though he likes to pad around the Institute's laboratory, and make suggestions for improving the apparatus. When people explain to him why the improvement will not improve, he says sadly: "Ja, Ja, I see that it will not work."