during the 1919 solar eclipse were the early experimental tests that distinguished general relativity from Newton's theory and the theory was quickly accepted. Just to be sure, Einstein didn't need experiments to be sure that Newton's theory of gravity had to lose in the experimental match: it was incompatible with the empirically verified principle of relativity (as implemented in special relativity).Karl Schwarzschild found the first black hole solution of the theory already in 1917. But the world needed to wait for more than a decade to appreciate the general relativity's implications for cosmology. The Universe can't be static, we finally learned. Instead, it's expanding ("shrinking" was a priori allowed as well, but wrong) and the rate of expansion has to change with time. The big bang theory moreor less follows from general relativity.In the 1960s, people found new experiments that verified the gravitational red shift and other predictions. In the same decade, people began to actually trust the existence of the black holes (John Wheeler coined the new, better name for what had been known as "frozen stars" in that decade). In the 1970s, Bekenstein and Hawking started the research into the thermodynamic and quantum properties of black holes and string theory was identified as a consistent of quantum theory of gravity. The full realistic versions of string theory only began to be studied in the 1980s but that's already a little bit different history.These days, some of the motivations and "modes of thinking" that Einstein exploited to converge to his right equations seem totally