 and go into electrical engineering, but Einstein had difficulties with the school’s teaching methods, preferring self-directed to rote learning.
It was during a visit to him family in Italy 1894 that Einstein wrote a short essay titled “On the Investigation of the State of the Ether in a Magnetic Field” – which would be his first scientific publication. In 1895, Einstein took the entrance exam to the Swiss Federal Polytechnic in Zürich – currently known as Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (ETH Zurich).
Though he failed to meet all of the requirements, he obtained exceptional grades in physics and mathematics. On the advice of the principal of Zürich Polytechnic, he attended the Argovian cantonal school in Aarau, Switzerland, to finish his secondary schooling. This he did between 1895-96, while staying with the family of a professor.
In September 1896, he passed the Swiss exit exam with mostly good grades, including top grades in physics and mathematical subjects. Though only 17, he enrolled in the four-year mathematics and physics teaching diploma program at the Zürich Polytechnic. It was there that he met his first and future wife, Mileva Maric, a Serbian national and the only woman among the six students in the mathematics and physics section.
The two would marry in 1904 and have two sons, but would divorce by 1919 after living apart for five years. Afterward, Einstein remarried, this time to his cousin Elsa Löwenthal – with whom he remained married until her death in 1939. It was also during this time that Einstein went on to make his greatest scientific achievements.
In 1900, Einstein was awarded the Zürich Polytechnic teaching diploma. After graduating, he spent close to two years searching for a teaching post and acquired his Swiss citizenship. Eventually, and with the help of his friend and colleague Marcel Grossmann’s father, Einsten secured a job in the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern. In 1903, his position became permanent.
Much of Einstein’s work at the patent office was related to questions about the transmission of electric signals and the electrical-mechanical synchronization of time. These technical problems would show up repeatedly in Einstein’s thought experiments, eventually leading him to his radical conclusions about the nature of light and the fundamental connection between space and time.
In 1900, he published a paper titled “Folgerungen aus den Capillaritätserscheinungen” (“Conclusions from the Capillarity Phenomena”). Drawing on Newton’s theory of universal gravitation, he proposed in this paper that the theory that the interactions between all molecules are a universal function of distance, in analogy with the inverse-square force of gravity. This would later be proven to be incorrect, but the publication of the paper in the prestigious Annalen der Physik (Journal of Physics) garnered attention from the academic world.
On April 30th, 1905, Einstein completed his thesis under the watchful eye of Professor Alfred Kleiner, the university’s Professor of Experimental Physics. His dissertation – which was titled, “A New Determination of Molecular Dimensions” – earned him a PhD with the University of Zürich.
That same year, in an explosion of creative intellectual energy – what is known as his “annus mirabilis” (miracle year) – Einstein also published four groundbreaking papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy, which would bring him to the notice of the international scientific community.
By 1908, he was appointed as a lecturer at the University of Bern. The following year, after giving a lecture on electrodynamics and the relativity principle at the University of Zurich, Alfred Kleiner recommended him to the faculty for a newly created professorship in theoretical physics. Einstein was appointed associate professor in 1909.
In April 1911, Einstein became a full professor at the Charles-Ferdinand University in Praque, which was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the time. During his time in Prague, h