The young patent officer in 1905 Credit: Leo Baeck Institute, New York

Or so the story goes. Recalling the incident in later years, Einstein seemed unsure whether it had really made such a deep impression on him at the time, or whether this was something he had ‘remembered’ later; but this has been no barrier to the tale becoming part of the Einstein legend

Einstein is often portrayed as the stereotypical absent-minded professor, lost in his theoretical world of equations and out of touch with practicalities. But he had a great interest in technical gadgets; possibly inspired by the electrical company his family ran during his childhood. This must have helped him to get a job with the Swiss Patent Office as a ‘Technical Expert, Third Class’ in 1902.

Volume 17 of Annalen der Physik contains three of Einstein’s papers Credit: Science Museum/Science & Society Picture Library

Einstein’s spare-time search for a worldview that would describe all of physics reached its high point in 1905. He finally earned his physics doctorate, but this work was surpassed by four papers, concerning several physics problems, published that year in the journal Annalen der Physik. In March he submitted a paper arguing that light consists of packets of energy called quanta, work which would later earn him the Nobel Prize. A paper sent in May described the motion of small particles suspended in a liquid and hence proved the existence of molecules. In June, Einstein submitted a paper hypothesising that light always travels at the same speed for all observers, which today we call the ‘special theory of relativity'. And in September he described how mass and energy are linked, which led to the famous equation E=mc2.

Any one of these papers was worthy of elevating the 26-year-old Einstein from lowly patent officer to fully-fledged academic, and his career as a physicist was assured. But his fame was to spread far beyond the scientific community.