“Just think what a wonderful job this would be for me! I’ll be mad with joy if something should come of that.”
So wrote a 23-year old Albert Einstein upon learning of an opportunity to work as a patent examiner at the Swiss Patent office. While Einstein’s tenure with the Swiss Patent Office as a “Third Class Patent Examiner” has often been portrayed as a lowly and even menial job, depicts the position as a prestigious civil servant post, typically subject to a rigorous selection process. Albert Einstein’s seven years as a patent examiner nurtured, rather than impeded, the development of his revolutionary theories of physics, including his Special Theory of Relativity published in 1905.
Einstein owed his position at the patent office to a friend whose close relationship with the director paved the way for Einstein’s appointment by tailoring the requirements of the position to Einstein’s credentials. Thus, the official announcement for the position specified that the candidate should have a background in engineering and physics – qualifications Einstein possessed – but did not require the candidate to have a doctorate, a degree Einstein had not yet obtained.
Fortunately for Einstein, whose efforts to obtain an academic appointment had proven fruitless, and for the future of theoretical physics, still constrained by the laws of Newton, he obtained the patent appointment in June 1902. Einstein excelled at his job. He typically completed a full day’s worth of patent examinations after just a few hours, leaving the rest of the day for him to work through the “thought experiments” that would transform physics. Even the location of the Patent Office itself, next to the famous Clock Tower in Bern, created a metaphor for Einstein’s theories.
Einstein worked at the office at a time when it received many patent applications dealing with the synchronization of clocks at distant locations and the use of electromagnetic devices to accomplish such purpose. These applications where assigned to Einstein’s desk and spurred his thinking that time was not absolute. As Einstein would later explain of relativity, "Two events which, viewed from a system of coordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relative to that system."
His supervisor gave him instructions well suited to the rebellious theorist: "You have to remain critically vigilant . . . . When you pick up an application, think that everything the inventor says is wrong." Working outside of academia provided further advantages. “An academic career in which a person is forced to produce scientific writings in great amounts creates a danger of intellectual superficiality,” he said. No such barriers constrained him at the patent office.
In 1907, shortly after obtaining his doctorate, Einstein obtained a promotion to "Second Class Patent Examiner.” But the pull of his growing fame from the publication of his ground-breaking theories in 1905 prompted him to leave his promising career at the patent office in 1908 so he could obtain his first full-time academic position. Eleven years later, an experiment involving the displacement of starlight during a solar eclipse would validate a critical aspect of his Special Theory of Relativity and catapult the once obscure patent examiner to world fame.
Even great figures start from somewhere.
