Einstein had come to the picturesque Swiss capital to take up his first real job: an entry-level position as a technical examiner in a government patent office. The apartment where he once lived, at Kramgasse 49—now a museum—is nestled in a row of modest, low-rise residential buildings in the centre of town. The patent job, tour guide Ruth Aegler tells me in a thick Swiss-German accent, brought in just 3,500 francs a year, barely enough to cover the rent and provide the basic necessities of life for the scientist and his young wife, Mileva. “Einstein was so happy and so proud that he could, for the first time in his young life, rent an apartment like that,” Aegler says. “Only sixty square metres. That’s not much, but for him it was absolutely luxury.”
The Berne museum, called Einsteinhaus, is bracing for an onslaught of Einstein-minded visitors this year, as the world celebrates the hundredth anniversary of Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the “miracle year” in which the young scientist penned four groundbreaking physics papers, including the one that introduced the theory of relativity. The museum has already welcomed nearly a quarter-million visitors from more than 150 countries since it opened in 1979. They stream through its modest, wallpapered rooms, pondering Einstein’s stand-up wooden desk from the patent office, dozens of photographs, and even his high-school report cards. By walking where he walked, breathing his air, and immersing themselves in his world, they hope to gain at least a glimpse of Einstein’s genius.
Even defining genius is no trivial matter. It is certainly more than just intelligence, or at least more than the narrow facet of intelligence measured by IQ tests. The physicist Richard Feynman’s IQ was just 122, while biologist Francis Crick’s was 115—still above average but hardly suggestive of Nobel-worthy mental abilities. Meanwhile, some high-IQ people never accomplish much. ( The highest score ever recorded belongs to Marilyn vos Savant, who has an IQ of 228. She earns a living writing a question-and-answer column for Parade magazine.)
Yet we have no problem whatsoever picking out the geniuses from the great lineup of history. When asked to name a genius, we always cite the same few examples. Psychologists in Britain have actually confirmed this habit: in a survey carried out at regular intervals between 1984 and 1997, students were asked to “nominate” three geniuses. Einstein was by far the most frequently cited name, taking the number one position in each year that the survey was carried out. The number two position most often went to Mozart, though on one occasion it went to Newton and once to Freud. Darwin, Shakespeare, and Leonardo da Vinci also consistently rank high.
Our difficulty is not in identifying geniuses but in pinning down the qualities or attributes that allowed them to achieve what they did. Roughly speaking, we want to determine whether geniuses are born or made; whether they come into the world with some special “gift,” or achieve genius-level greatness through some combination of family influence, early environment, and hard work. In other words: is it in their nature, or must a “genius” be nurtured in just the right way in order to blossom?
Good genes certainly don’t hurt. The Bach family produced such a wealth of musical high achievers that one cannot help but consider the role that genes may have played. It couldn’t have done Charles Darwin any harm either that his grandfather Erasmus was a noted physician, botanist, poet, and freethinker who speculated about evolution. Fittingly, Francis Galton, Darwin’s cousin, was among the first to popularize this notion in his 1869 book, Hereditary Genius. (Galton, also remembered as the father of eugenics, has seen his reputation decline sharply in the intervening years.) Others who have tackled the genius question have found a hodgepodge of characteristics that seem to accompany it. The British psychologist Havelock Ellis, in his 1904 Study in British Genius, concluded that the typical genius was fathered by a man over thirty and a mother over twenty-five and that many geniuses were sickly as children. Cesare Lombroso, writing in Italy at about the same time, found that many geniuses were celibate, citing Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton as examples—although it has since been shown that Galileo in fact fathered a number of illegitimate children with his mistress.
Those studies, while interesting, seem more like stamp collecting than science and say almost nothing about where or when the next genius will emerge. Newton, Shakespeare, Beethoven, and Michelangelo have no illustrious or even talented ancestors that we know of. And just because you are a genius doesn’t mean your children will be.
(The Einstein family offers a mixed bag of evidence. Albert’s elder son, Hans Albert, became a successful engineer, though not, it seems, of “genius” calibre; his younger son, Eduard, was a first-rate student and was musically talented—something he shared with his father, Albert, and his grandmother Pauline—but he developed schizophrenia at age twenty and lived out his final years in a Swiss mental institution. A daughter, Lieserl, was born before Albert and Mileva had married, and was given up for adoption.)
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