"I, Albert Einstein, was born on March 14, 1879 in Ulm, Germany. Almost eighty years later, I died because of a ruptured aortic aneurysm at 1:15 A.M., April 18, 1955. I was asleep when it happened. The doctors at Princeton Hospital, where I was being treated, tried to persuade me to accept surgery, but I refused, saying I did not believe in 'artificially prolonging life.'

"I became famous when Arthur Eddington organized an expedition to prove my prediction of gravity's effect on light. When the expedition's results were announced publicly, I immediately became a celebrity.

"My father's name is Hermann Einstein, he died in Milan in 1902. My mother's name is Pauline; she died in 1920, only a year after I became famous. The family business was in the newly discovered electric industry, however, our company went out of business or bankrupt multiple times. Our first company in Ulm soon failed, and that is when we moved to Munich, a larger city. That move occurred in 1880.

"In 1881, my sister Maria, called Maja, was born. All through our lives, we were close companions. Maja was my only sibling.

"I didn't learn to speak until I was over three years old, and this worried my parents. They thought I was somehow mentally retarded. Many years later, I stated that I didn't talk when I was young because I didn't want to talk before I could form full sentences. When I was born, my grandfather thought I was much too heavy, and my mother thought my head was too large and square.

"One day, when I was young and sick in bed, my father gave me a compass. I immediately forgot my cold and wondered at the compass. It's amazing how it always points north, no matter how you turn it, I thought. That opened up part of my mind, and told me that great things were in store.

"I had an extremely violent temper when I was young. Once, I nearly hit Maja with a bowling ball, and another time she was whacked on the head with a garden hoe. My first violin lesson ended when I threw a chair at my teacher.

"In 1886, I entered a Catholic public school, even though I am Jewish. Because I was dreamy and spoke slowly, I did not do well. The school was strict and put the main emphasis on discipline. In 1888, I transferred to the Luitpold Gymnasium, a more academic school meant to prepare students for university study. It was even stricter than the Catholic school, but there was one teacher I liked. That teacher was Herr Reuss who taught literature. I liked him because, unlike the other teachers, Reuss did not teach by rote. Reuss encouraged students to think for themselves.

"I did well in Latin because it's grammar is logical, and also in mathematics because it is a sort of scientific language. I received the highest marks within my class in these two subjects. However, I refused to study anything that did not interest me.

"Soon after I entered the Luitpold Gymnasium, I met medical student Max Talmey. Every Thursday Talmey came over for supper, and I then became good friends with Max. In appreciation of the weekly meal, Max Talmey loaned me books on science, starting with a series called Popular Books on Natural Science by Aaron Bernstein. Then he brought more advanced books, like Force and Matter by Ludwig Buchner, and Kosmos by Alexander von Humboldt.

"The book that had the greatest impression on me was a geometry textbook that Talmey had loaned to Albert. 'After a short while… he had worked through the whole book. He thereupon devoted himself to higher mathematics, studying all by himself.... Soon the flight of his mathematical genius was so high that I could no longer follow,' wrote Talmey years later.

"The family business again began to falter. In 1894, my family moved to Milan, Italy, but this time I was intentionally left behind. I slept in a boarding house while trying to earn my diploma at the gymnasium.

"However, I did not like submitting myself to the authority of the gymnasium. Also, if I stayed in Germany until I was sixteen, I would be required to submit to the additional authority of national military service. With the help of some friends, I dropped out of the gymnasium.

"Six months after the rest of my family moved, I joined them as a high-school dropout.

"In Milan, 1895, I failed the entrance exam for the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, called Eidgenossische Technische Hochschule or ETH, for short. However, the head of the school was so impressed with my mathematical skills he offered to let me in the next year, if only I could earn a high-school diploma.

"For the next year, I went to a high-school in the Swiss town of Aarau, close to the German border. I lived with the family of one of the teachers, named Jost Winteler.

"My brain began to blossom in the open educational atmosphere, and I soon taught myself calculus. I then began to think about what it would be like to ride on a beam of light. Since I never liked just learning boring facts, I did my best work when I was allowed to use my imagination. I would never conduct experiments in a laboratory. Instead, I did 'thought experiments,' working the theories out in my mind.

"I found myself in love with Marie Winteler. At home in the Winteler house we played piano and violin duets. When I entered ETH, I often wrote letters to Marie. However, then the letters stopped. I could not tell Marie that I had found a new love.

"In 1896 I met Mileva Maric. We were in love, but my father would not allow our marriage. Mileva was also enrolled in ETH.

"On July 28, 1900, I received my diploma from ETH. I had scored well on the final exams, but Mileva had failed.

"I encouraged Mileva to try again the next year, and she agreed.

"I unexpectedly received a job offer in Winterthur as a teacher. I accepted the temporary job, and was glad my friend Marcel Grossman was working on getting me a more permanent job at the Swiss patent office in Bern.

"Later that summer, Mileva learned that she had again failed exams at ETH.

"In 1902, Mileva and I had our first child, Liserl. However, Liserl mysteriously disappeared. Whether she was put up for adoption or died, no one knows.

"On June 16, 1902, I received the exciting news that in a week I would begin working at the Swiss patent office as a technical expert.

"In early October the same year Liserl was born, my father, Hermann died. This was very hard for me because on his deathbed, my father finally consented to my marriage to Mileva.

"On January 6, 1903, Mileva and I were married in Bern, and we immediately settled down to a quiet domestic life. In May 1904, Mileva gave birth to Hans Albert Einstein.

"In 1905, the German scientific journal Annalen der Physik (Annals of Physics) published four related papers written by me. One of them earned me my Ph. D., another, on the photoelectric effect, led to my winning the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics. A third one led to the development of the Atomic Bomb.

"However, the paper that would change the way people thought back then was 'On the Electrodynamics of Moving Bodies,' better known as the special theory of relativity.

"This is as simple as the special theory of relativity can get. Basically, it means that one person's 'now' is another person's 'then.' In this paper, I predicted that it would be possible to prove that gravity affects time. Many years after I died, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) conducted an experiment with a highly accurate atomic clock aboard a rocket, and the results showed my theory was correct.

"Another part of my theory states that moving objects contract as they accelerate. It is extremely hard, if not impossible, to measure the infinitesimally small shrinkage of a Frisbee flying across the yard, or even a jet plane taking off.

"I heard about someone named Max Plank who had a theory of his own, stating that light, heat, and other forms of radiation did not flow in a steady, uninterrupted stream, but instead in separate pieces of energy which he called 'quanta.' Although I was never sure about Plank's theory, my last project was to find a unified field theory, a theory that would connect Plank's quantum theories and my theories. I had not succeeded in creating this theory by the time I died, however.

"The first academic jobs of my life soon followed. Earlier, I had been recommended for a position as associate professor at the University of Zurich. However, the appointment had become bogged down in politics. A friend of mine named Friedrich Adler, son of founder of the Australian Social Democratic Party. Since most of the officials who were to agree on the appointment were Swiss Social Democrats, the position went to Adler, even though I would be better than him. When Adler heard that his father's name had won him the job, he refused to accept the job, and so the position went to me.

"On July 6, 1909, I resigned from the patent office and started my first academic position where I earned a salary. "Many of you have probably heard the equation E=MC2. I invented that equation, and it means energy equals mass times the square of the velocity of light in vacuum. The 'E' means 'energy'. The 'M' means 'mass'. The 'C' means 'the speed of light in vacuum'. I announced that theory, the theory of relativity, at a conference of leading scientists. "On July 28, 1910, my second son, Eduard Einstein, was born in Zurich. His arrival, unfortunately, happened right during a temporary financial disaster for my family and me.

"From 1912 to 1916, I, with the help of Marcel Grossman, invented the general theory of relativity. It includes my prediction about the effect of gravity on light. To explain my vision of gravity, think of space-time as a two-dimensional taut sheet of rubber, like a trampoline. Something heavy placed in the middle, like a bowling ball, would create deep sagging. Something else rolling by, like a tennis ball, would be pulled of it's original course and begin orbiting the bowling ball.

"Soon after my development of the theory of relativity, I asked Mileva for a divorce, and in February, 1919, we were divorced. In May that year, Arthur Eddington organized an expedition to prove my theory of gravity's effect on light. In June, I was married to cousin and divorcee Elsa Lowenthal. In November, the results of Eddington's expeditions were announced. My theory was proved correct, and I immediately became a celebrity.

"In 1920, my mother, Pauline, died of cancer. Anti-Semitism was beginning to grow in Berlin, where I lived at the time. "In 1922, after a visit to the United States, I received word that I had won the 1921 Nobel Prize. A year later, Hitler and the Nazis made a political grab for power. I was number one on their hit list, and fewer and fewer places were remaining safe for me.

"My family and secretary Helen Dukas moved to the United States of America in October, 1933, following Hitler's rise to power in Germany. My first public act in the United States was to buy a vanilla ice cream cone with sprinkles. I lived with my family in Princeton. "My wife, Elsa, went to Paris in 1934 to visit her daughter, Ilse, who was dying. After Ilse died, her other daughter, Margot, brought Elsa back. Two years later in December, Elsa died. I was extremely troubled during her final illness.

"Maja, my sister, came to live with me in Princeton in 1939. That year, I signed a letter drafted by Leo Szilard discussing the possibility of the splitting of a uranium atom, thereby creating a 'super bomb.' England and France had recently declared war on Germany and President Roosevelt appointed a group of scientists to work on the development of this bomb during this turbulent period. I was allowed very little information about this, however, because there were false rumors that I was a Communist and I was under secret FBI investigation.

"In 1940 I became a US citizen. A year later, Japan bombed Pearl Harbor and President Roosevelt signed a Declaration of War against Japan. By 1942 my health had become fragile and I could not leave my home in Princeton. I was a pacifist and I was not happy about the war raging on around me. I felt even worse when I learned that the bomb I had helped create had been dropped in Japan on August 6, 1945. The bomb killed 70,000 people instantly.

"World War II ended and I renewed my commitment to pacifism. Later I made an NBC broadcast about the horror of war. Some people began to make hateful comments about me because of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-communist campaign.

"At home in Princeton, my sister Maja died. I was now almost completely without family members, but I continued my work on my unified field theory.

"In April 1955 I collapsed at home and was taken to the hospital. I refused surgery on my burst aneurysm and died in my sleep at 1:15am on April 18th.

"All through my life I was a pacifist and used my celebrity to encourage world peace. I never cared enormously for one person. I was working more for world peace."