Hey, history lovers. I'm Mike Rosenwald with Retropod, a show about the past, rediscovered.

Albert Einstein is one of the most brilliant scientific minds ever to walk the earth.

He came up with one of the world's most iconic mathematical equations, E equals MC squared,

which explains the relationship between energy and mass.

He discovered that time does not move at the same speed at every point in the universe.

Incredibly, though, despite all these mind-blowing accomplishments,

the German-born scientists didn't become instantly famous for his discoveries.

In fact, he almost never became a scientist at all.

But one event changed the course of his life and history.

A solar eclipse.

Einstein studied math and physics at a polytechnic school in Zurich, Switzerland,

but he had trouble landing in academic position afterward.

So he took what he could get and became a patent

examiner. Yes, a patent examiner. According to the Swiss agency where he worked, Einstein

managed his days meticulously, eight hours of work inspecting new inventions, eight hours of sleep,

and eight hours of conducting inspecting new inventions, eight hours of sleep, and eight hours of conducting

his own research. While the patent work was rote and unexciting, just a way to pay the bills,

his side experiments yielded some groundbreaking results, like redefining the relationship

between space and time.

Einstein got some fancy academic appointments for his efforts,

but fame, no, not even close,

and not even after publishing his theory of relativity in 1915,

...