Albert Einstein's interest in physics began when his father gave him a compass when he was five. His teachers believed he had little scholastic promise, so he dropped out of school at the age of 15. Attending the Federal Polytechnic Academy in Zurich, he excelled in mathematics and physics and went on to take a succession of short-lived teaching posts. When his wife became pregnant, he took a job in the patent office. It was in this job that he developed his groundbreaking work on relativity (E = mc2), Brownian motion and the photoelectric effect, the latter which won him the 1921 Nobe…