Question of the Day

What was Albert Einstein's first job?

Albert Einstein started out working as a technical assistant examiner at the Swiss Patent Office in 1902. After his received his doctorate in 1905 and had several articles published, he began to rise as the scientist he is known as today. Starting in 1909, he accepted teaching positions at the University of Zurich, University of Prague and later the University of Berlin.

Even though Einstein's day job was as a clerk and later a teacher, he continued his research and writing. In 1905, he wrote four articles that laid groundwork for modern physics and gained him respect from fellow scientists, as well as his position as a college professor. He researched and wrote about quantum physics and used the theory of relativity to model the behavior of the universe in 1917. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for physics with a paper on the photoelectric effect. Einstein's third significant paper introduced the theory of relativity and the famous equation "E-mc2."

When Hitler took power in Germany, Einstein moved to the United States, where he began work as a guest professor at Princeton University in 1933. In 1939, he sent his famous letter to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt regarding how nuclear fission could be used for military purposes. While his research on this subject led to the Manhattan Project, Einstein was not a part of this effort. He did go on to do more work on the universal law of gravitation and electromagnetic force. After World War II, Einstein was offered the position of President of Israel, but he declined. He died of an aneurysm in 1955.

Although he was born in Germany and did some of his early work there, Albert Einstein did much of his work in Switzerland while working at the Swiss Patent Office. He also did some of his later work in the United States and lectured across Europe, America and the Far East.

Einstein began his education in Germany, but he received training to be a mathematics and physics teacher at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich. He then achieved Swiss citizenship and became a technical assistant at the patent office, where he published theories of physics and Newtonian mechanics. He then became a professor in Germany. In 1916 in Berlin, Einstein came up with the theory of gravitation and of relativity. He also worked on theories of radiation and statistics. Einstein was also a professor in the United States, where he worked on unified field theories and quantum theories.