3 Geniuses Who Changed the World: Biographies of Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison

By Anthony Moore

Discover the incredible lives of three geniuses who changed the world.

 

Throughout history, countless inventors and thinkers have left huge impacts on the way we live – but none have been more impactful than the three men in this biography bundle. Inside, you'll uncover the lives and powerful legacies of three inventors who irreversibly shaped the modern world.

 

You'll discover:

• Albert Einstein, the incredible German Mathematician who developed the theory of relativity and revolutionized our understanding of physics and the universe.
• Nikola Tesla, who pioneered major discoveries such as AC currents and the famous Tesla Coil.
• And Thomas Edison, the amazing inventor who became the father of countless technologies which we all use in the modern world.

The world wouldn't be the same without the inventions of these three men. Each of them pioneered science and took our technology to a whole new level. Now you can discover just how they did it.

 

Buy now to discover the lives and legacies of these three geniuses today!

• Language: English
• Publisher: MG Publishing
• Release date: Dec 27, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393396857

Anthony Moore

Anthony Moore writes on personal growth, self-improvement, and behavioral change. His work has been published on Medium, Business Insider, CNBC, Yahoo!, and Thought Catalog. Anthony has a Masters in Psychology from the University of the Rockies. He and his wife live in San Diego, CA but are currently based in Vietnam teaching English and traveling the world.

Book preview

3 Geniuses Who Changed the World

Biographies of Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, and Thomas Edison

––––––––

By

Anthony Moore

Table of Contents

Albert Einstein:  A Biography

Family and Early Life

Switzerland, Marriage, and The Olympia Academy

Miracle Year and Academic Success

Eddington Experiment

Princeton, NJ

Other Beliefs and Death

Legacy

Nikola Tesla: A Biography

Chapter One: Child of The Light

Chapter Two: The War of The Currents

Chapter Three: Alternating Current vs. Direct Current

Chapter Four: Tesla’s Labs

Chapter Five: Wireless Electricity

Chapter Six: Tesla, Marconi and Morgan

Chapter Seven: Tesla’s Other Inventions

Chapter Eight: Tesla’s Personal Life

Thomas Edison:  A Biography

Introduction: Going Beyond the Facts

Part One: A Curious Lad

Part Two: A Determined Young Man

Part Three: Lighting the Way

Concluding Remarks

Albert Einstein:

A Biography

Family and Early Life

The son of Hermann, an engineer and businessman, and Pauline, a well-educated housewife with a tendency toward the creative arts, it’s natural to think of Albert’s parents as the two halves of his creative genius. His father, Hermann Einstein, was born in 1847 in the town of Buchau, Germany. From a very young age, Hermann had a strong affinity for mathematics. At the age of 14 he left for Stuttgart, Germany, the capital of their local kingdom, for secondary school (the German Empire was fragmented into smaller kingdoms at the time). Hermann believed that he could have been successful academically, but financial constraints on his family forced him into an apprenticeship so he could become a merchant. He settled there for a while, and it was around this time he met his wife, Pauline Koch.

Pauline was born in 1858 as the youngest of four siblings. A fairly modest upbringing, but by no means poor, Pauline’s father, along with her uncle, had made a considerable amount of money in the corn trade. In fact, her father and uncle were each named Royal Württemberg Purveyor to the Court, presumably because of how bountiful their corn harvests were. That isn’t to say they were rich, either. Providing a lot of corn could not make one rich in the Kingdom of Württemberg, a small subsection of the German Empire. 

Pauline married Hermann on August 8, 1876, when she was 18 and he was 28. The couple settled in the town of Ulm, a fairly busy town with a rich history. It is home (to this day) to the tallest church steeple in the world, dating back to the Gothic era c.1377. The Einstein family was large, and Hermann had joined his cousins for work, who had a feather bed shop. However, Hermann was not interested in his work with bedding and goose feathers. 

Born March 14, 1879, in the city of Ulm, Kingdom of Württemberg of the German Empire, was Albert Einstein. Hermann wanted to move the family to a city with more opportunities, so he and his brother Jakob managed to start an electrical engineering company called Einstein & Cie in Munich, where the family moved. It seems the entire Einstein family was inclined toward mathematics and the sciences. The couple had their second child, Maria, in 1881. She would be Albert’s only sibling. 

The family was trying to find success, and they were modestly succeeding. They were Ashkenazi Jews by lineage, but they were not particularly observant and did not participate in the religious community. In 1885, Hermann and his brother found some luck when they won the contract to provide lighting for Oktoberfest. This was the very first Oktoberfest that used electric lights. Their business was heavily reliant on DC, or direct current, a still-new technology at the time.

While Hermann and Jakob were getting government contracts that provided some security for their families, young Albert Einstein was starting to grow up. Albert was six years old when his father received that contract, and at that young age Einstein was not a particularly impressive student. In fact, his parents often worried about his intellectual ability because he was slow to start speaking. It’s said that he would often whisper words to himself quietly before speaking them aloud, and it was this tendency along with his general slow pace of learning that garnered him the family nickname of der Depperte—the dopey one. 

This trouble with speaking would slowly go away as he grew, but he was still struggling with it as late as nine years old. But that was not the totality of Einstein’s intelligence. At the insistence of his mother Pauline, young Einstein began studying the violin at age five. He was not particularly interested in playing, but he kept at it and found a moderate amount of enjoyment from it. The complexity and mathematics involved in music-making may have been a hint at what would come. 

His parents insisted that he receive tutoring so he would not fall behind his classmates. Once a week, starting when Einstein was ten years old, he would be visited every Thursday by Max Talmey, a medical student at the Munich Medical School. Max would tutor Einstein in the subjects of mathematics and science. In the 1930s, Talmey was interviewed by the New York Times because of his relationship with Einstein as a boy. He said:

Although there was a difference of 11 years between us, the boy had such an aptitude and zest for knowledge that it was an easy matter to get along together. I lent him many of my scientific books and he mastered their content in several months.

Indeed, Einstein was a fast learner when he was adequately challenged. He taught himself algebra and Euclidean Geometry when he was 12 years old over the summer. It is safe to say that virtually no German schoolboys were teaching themselves higher mathematics during the summer. Talmey’s lessons with the boy eventually were exhausted as the young Einstein had surpassed his tutor’s expertise in mathematics. But that did not mean an end to their weekly sessions; rather, it meant that Einstein would turn his studies beyond mathematics to philosophy. 

It is not commonly known that Einstein took an interest in academic philosophy, which may come as a surprise. Many famous scientists of today deride philosophy, particularly philosophy of science, for its lack of empirical measurement and analyzable results; but Einstein found the subject matter challenging and forced him to think in ways he was not used to. This interest was piqued by Talmey, who started lending Einstein philosophy texts when he could no longer keep up with him mathematically. 

In 1892, Einstein was introduced to philosopher Immanuel Kant, an extremely influential thinker. He did for the discipline of philosophy what Einstein would do to science—completely groundbreaking and changed the paradigm forever. Talmey would say, At the time he was still a child, only thirteen years old, yet Kant's works, incomprehensible to ordinary mortals, seemed to be clear to him. Einstein’s favorite text was Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, known as an incredibly hard text for those studying philosophy at the university, even today. The book primarily discusses the limits of human knowledge, the nature of space and time, and generally the entirety of metaphysics (no small matter indeed). 

It makes sense that Einstein would be enthralled with these sorts of questions. After all, Einstein is not famous for being in the laboratory wearing his lab coat and safety glasses when conducting experiments. Rather, he is most famous for his thought experiments. It is often overlooked that the work Einstein would become famous for equally impacted the fields of philosophy as it did for science. Indeed, Einstein is considered a philosopher by academia. His science transformed our philosophical understanding of what space and time actually are. That is far beyond a simple scientific experiment. 

One wonders what would have become of Einstein if he did not have a tutor who engaged him in these works and accelerated his mathematical knowledge. Perhaps he would have grown up like his father and yearned for further study but would be blocked by outside forces. Instead, he had a strong aptitude for challenging subject matter, and he sought them out. 

While Einstein was going to school and studying math and philosophy with his tutor, his father’s business, Einstein & Cie, was struggling. After initial success, the company began to falter as a result of changing technology. The business was based on direct current, but it was becoming apparent that the preferred technology was AC, or alternating current. Young Albert, the only son and the eldest child, was to grow up and take control of this company, but faltering business and financial missteps made that unlikely. The small company lost a contract to connect electricity from Munich to Schukert, as Schukert was already using AC, and the Einsteins could not afford to convert their entire company from DC to AC. Because of situations like this, lost contracts and missed opportunities due to changing technology, Hermann and the Einstein family would leave Germany.

The brothers sold their factory in Munich, and when settled in Italy, Hermann opened a new electrical engineering company, but this time alone, only receiving some financial assistance from his cousin, Rudolf Einstein, to get the business started. Young Albert, however, did not go to Italy right away. He was to stay in Munich and finish school. It did not seem wise to remove him from school in the midst of his studies. Einstein hated the way school was taught as he grew up. He thought the regimented, repetitious teaching methods were ineffective and created boredom and resentment more than a thirst for knowledge. He preferred the unstructured, self-teaching environment provided by his former tutor Max Talmey, who had since moved away after he finished medical school. With a lack of an outlet and missing his family, Einstein dropped out of school in Munich and went to Italy to be with his family, but did not stay there very long.

Switzerland, Marriage, and The Olympia Academy

Shortly after arriving in Italy, Einstein wanted to return to his studies. It was clear that he did not want to follow in his father’s footsteps and run an engineering company. He wanted to attain higher knowledge, study upper-level mathematics, and physics. In 1895, at the age of 16, Einstein applied to the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zürich. To his surprise, he failed the entrance exam. While he did do very well on the mathematics portion, he failed the botany, zoology, and language portions. This frustrated Einstein as all he wanted to do was study mathematics. The very same issues he had with the school system in Munich, which pushed him to study what he perceived as useless disciplines, were now the reason he could not get into the very school he wanted. 

On the advice of the school’s principal, Einstein went to a different school—Argovian Cantonal School in Aarau, Switzerland. This was so Einstein would properly complete his secondary schooling, that which never happened in Munich. During this time, Einstein, with expressed permission from his father, renounced his citizenship of the Kingdom of Württemberg so he could avoid conscription. This left Einstein in a peculiar position where he was a citizen of no country. 

Nonetheless, he was permitted to finish his secondary schooling in Switzerland and ultimately passed the Matura, which is the mandatory exit exam students need to pass to receive their secondary school diplomas. Einstein received the highest possible marks in physics and mathematics, and now, less than two years after failing to enter the Swiss Polytechnic Institute in Zürich, Einstein was admitted into a four-year program focusing on physics and mathematics. 

During his time at the institute is when Einstein met Mileva Marić. Mileva was the only woman enrolled in the Department of Mathematics and Physics at the time, and would go on to be only the second woman to finish a full program. However, she could not pass her exit exam, despite trying twice, and she never received her full diploma. It should be noted that in one of her failed exams she received the same grade in physics as Albert (5.5/6). Mileva and Albert started their relationship as a platonic friendship, but this soon became romantic. They would read what was then known as extracurricular physics, now known as theoretical physics, and it was a topic of increasing interest to the young Einstein. 

Albert and Mileva would marry in January 1903; but prior to their marriage, it is known they had one child. Her name was known only as Lieserl, and her existence was not revealed until previously unseen letters were found by Einstein’s descendants in 1986. The letters were written while Mileva was in Serbia with her parents while Albert stayed in Switzerland pursuing his academic ventures. It’s possible the child was kept secret due to the fact she was born out of wedlock, but details are scant. Albert and Mileva kept a sense of humor about their unborn child, with Albert wanting a boy and Mileva wanting a girl. They used the names Hanserl and Lieserl as placeholder names for a boy and a girl, respectively. The child was born sometime before February 1902, as Albert wrote in a letter to his wife: ... now you see that it really is a Lieserl, just as you'd wished. Is she healthy and does she cry properly? [...] I love her so much and don't even know her yet! Clearly, Einstein was happy about this child, but something happened in 1903. Correspondence by Einstein showed he was concerned she had Scarlet Fever, and his last reference to her was in a letter that September. When Mileva finally joined Albert in Switzerland, she did not have the child with her. 

Speculation runs rampant regarding this child, particularly since her existence was not known during Einstein’s life. As such, he was never asked about her, and none of his living relatives seem to have had any idea themselves. The most popular theory is that the child simply died that fall of Scarlet Fever. Others have suggested that the language of Einstein’s later letters suggest the child being put up for adoption, but this is disputed and not considered solid evidence. Others claim she grew up and lived a full life, but these claims, too, are dubious. Ultimately, the fate of Albert Einstein’s first child, Lieserl Einstein, is not known. Mileva did ultimately join Albert in Switzerland in 1903 where he had been working at the patent office for a year. They married in January and they had their second child, Hans Albert Einstein, who was born in Bern, Switzerland, in May 1904.

After Einstein graduated in 1900, he unsuccessfully searched for a teaching position. Resistance by one of his professors in Zürich denied Einstein the traditional route toward professorship, so he lacked the advantages he presumed he would receive. So, Einstein took whatever position he could, which for him meant becoming a Patent Examiner - Class III at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property in Bern.

He did not get the position at the office on his own accord,