indication that he , and these were suppressed and hidden until 1986, when scholars and the editors of his papers were completely surprised to learn of Lieserl’s existence.*
But in his letter to Mari right after Lieserl’s birth, the baby brought out Einstein’s wry side. “She’s certainly able to cry already, but won’t know how to laugh until much later,” he said. “Therein lies a profound truth.”
Fatherhood also focused him on the need to make some money while he waited to get the patent-office job. So the next day an ad appeared in the newspaper: “Private lessons in Mathematics and Physics . . . given most thoroughly by Albert Einstein, holder of the federal Polytechnic teacher’s diploma ... Trial lessons free.”
Lieserl’s birth even caused Einstein to display a domestic, nesting instinct not previously apparent. He found a large room in Bern and drew for Mari a sketch of it, complete with diagrams showing the bed, six chairs, three cabinets, himself (“Johnnie”), and a couch marked “look at that!”63 However, Mari
was not going to be moving into it with him. They were not married, and an aspiring Swiss civil servant could not be seen cohabitating in such a way. Instead, after a few months, Mari
moved back to Zurich to wait for him to get a job and, as promised, marry her. She did not bring Lieserl with her.
Einstein and his daughter apparently never laid eyes on each other. She would merit, as we shall see, just one brief mention in their surviving correspondence less than two years later, in September 1903, and then not be referred to again. In the meantime, she was left back in Novi Sad with her mother’s relatives or friends so that Einstein could maintain both his unencumbered lifestyle and the bourgeois respectability he needed to become a Swiss official.
There is a cryptic hint that the person who took custody of Lieserl may have been Mari’s close friend, Helene Kaufler Savi
, whom she had met in 1899 when they lived in the same rooming house in Zurich. Savi
was from a Viennese Jewish family and had married an engineer from Serbia in 1900. During her pregnancy, Mari
had written her a letter pouring out all of her woes, but she tore it up before mailing it. She was glad she had done so, she explained to Einstein two months before Lieserl’s birth, because “I don’t think we should say anything about Lieserl yet.” Mari
added that Einstein should write Savi
a few words now and then. “We must now treat her very nicely. She’ll have to help us in something important, after all.”64
As he was waiting to be offered the job at the patent office, Einstein ran into an acquaintance who was working there. The job was boring, the person complained, and he noted that the position Einstein was waiting to get was “the lowest rank,” so at least he didn’t have to worry that anyone else would apply for it. Einstein was unfazed. “Certain people find everything boring,” Einstein told Mari. As for the disdain about being on the lowest rung, Einstein told her that they should feel just the opposite: “We couldn’t care less about being on top!”65
The job finally came through on June 16, 1902, when a session of the Swiss Council officially elected him “provisionally as a Technical Expert Class 3 of the Federal Office for Intellectual Property with an annual salary of 3,500 francs,” which was actually more than what a junior professor would make.66
His office in Bern’s new Postal and Telegraph Building was near the world-famous clock tower over the old city gate (see p. 107). As he turned left out of his apartment on his way to work, Einstein walked past it every day. The clock was originally built shortly after the city was founded in 1191, and an astronomical contraption featuring the positions of the planets was added in 1530. Every hour, the clock would put on its show: out would come a dancing jester ringing bells, then a parade of bears, a crowing rooster, and an armored knight, followed by Father Time with his scepter and hourglass.
The clock was the official timekeeper for the nearby train station, the one from which all of the other clocks that lined the platform were synchronized. The moving trains arriving from other cities, where the local time was not always standardized, would reset their own clocks by looking up at the Bern clock tower as they sped into town.67
So it was that Albert Einstein would end up spending the most creative seven years of his life—even after he had written the papers that reoriented physics—arriving at work at 8 a.m., six days a week, and examining patent applications. “I am frightfully busy,” he wrote a friend a few months later. “Every day I spend eight hours at the office and at least one hour of private lessons, and then, in addition, I do some scientific work.” Yet it would be wrong to think that poring over applications for patents was drudgery. “I enjoy my work at the office very much, because it is uncommonly diversified.”68
He soon learned that he could work on the patent applications so quickly that it left time for him to sneak in his own scientific thinking during the day. “I was able to do a full day’s work in only two or three hours,” he recalled. “The remaining part of the day, I would work out my own ideas.” His boss, Friedrich Haller, was a man of good- natured, growling skepticism and genial humor who graciously ignored the sheets of paper that cluttered Einstein’s desk and vanished into his drawer when people came to see him. “Whenever anybody would come by, I would cram my notes into my desk drawer and pretend to work on my office work.”69
Indeed, we should not feel sorry for Einstein that he found himself exiled from the cloisters of academe. He came to believe that it was a benefit to his science, rather than a burden, to work instead in “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”70
Every day, he would do thought experiments based on theoretical premises, sniffing out the underlying realities. Focusing on real-life questions, he later said,“stimulated me to see the physical ramifications of theoretical concepts.”71 Among the ideas that he had to consider for patents were dozens of new methods for synchronizing clocks and coordinating time through signals sent at the speed of light.72
In addition, his boss Haller had a credo that was as useful for a creative and rebellious theorist as it was for a patent examiner: “You have to remain critically vigilant.” Question every premise, challenge conventional wisdom, and never accept the truth of something merely because everyone else views it as obvious. Resist being credulous. “When you pick up an application,” Haller instructed, “think that everything the inventor says is wrong.”73
Einstein had grown up in a family that created patents and tried to apply them in business, and he found the process to be fulfilling. It reinforced one of his ingenious talents: the ability to conduct thought experiments in which he could visualize how a theory would play out in practice. It also helped him peel off the irrelevant facts that surrounded a problem.74
Had he been consigned instead to the job of an assistant to a professor, he might have felt compelled to churn out safe publications and be overly cautious in challenging accepted notions. As he later noted, originality and creativity were not prime assets for climbing academic ladders, especially in the German-speaking world, and he would have felt pressure to conform to the prejudices or prevailing wisdom of his patrons. “An academic career in
