1879 - Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, the son of a Jewish featherbed merchant. He does not speak until he is nearly three years old.

1884 - Hemann Einstein gives his ill son a pocket compass to play with while he is bedridden. In later life, Einstein points to this incident as the beginning of his interest in physics and electromagnetic theories.

1895 - Einstein leaves the numbing atmosphere of the Luitpald Gymnasium, where education is rote and creative thinking is discouraged. The following year he denounces his German citizenship and enrolls at a technical institute in Zurich, Switzerland.

1902 - After several unsuccessful attempts at securing a teaching position, Einstein lands a job at a patent office in Bern. During this time Einstein writes letters to Mileva Maric, a woman he met as a student in Zurich. The letters reveal an illegitimate daughter (whose fate remains unknown) and the first mentions of theories on relativity. He marries Mileva the following year.

1905 - The first papers on Brownian motion and special relativity are published. Einstein is twenty-six years old.

1913 - Einstein is invited to join the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin. Soon after he returns to Germany, he and Mileva separate. Mileva returns to Zurich with their two sons, Hans Albert and Edward. In July of 1914, World War I erupts.

1919 - Einstein marries his divorced cousin Elsa, who nursed him during a severe liver ailment and stomach disorder. The same year he receives a telegram informing him that a solar eclipse proves his measurements of the bending of light. The London Times: "Revolution in Science - New Theory of the Universe - Newtonian Ideas Overthrown." The New York Times: "Lights All .Askew in The Heavens - Einstein Theory Triumphs."

1920 - Disturbances during a Iecture given by Einstein at the University of BerIin. Einstein attends a mass meeting against the general relativity theory. Responding to rumors that he plans to leave Germany because of displays of anti-Semitism, Einstein states that Berlin is the kind of place where he feels most closely connected by human and scientific relations.

1922 - Einstein wins the Nobel Prize. The prize money is sent to Mileva.

1932 - Einstein and his wife, Elsa, depart from Germany for the United States. They will never return to Germany again.

1933 - Adolf Hitler takes power. Einstein makes a brief trip to Switzerland, where he sees his schizophrenic son Edward for the last time. Edward remains in a psychiatric hospital until his death in 1965.

1939 - Einstein signs a Ietter to President Roosevelt encouraging the development of atomic energy for military purposes.

1943 - Einstein signs a consultant's contract with the Research and Development Division of the U.S. Navy - Bureau of Ordnance, section Ammunition and Explosives, subsection High Explosives and Propellants. His consultant fee is $25 per day.

1945 - Germany surrenders on May 8. On August 6th, the atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima in Japan. A second bomb is dropped on Nagasaki three days later. Einstein tells a reporter, "The world is not yet ready for it. He delivers a report in New York, "The War is Won but Peace is not."

1946 - After their release from imprisonment in England, the German atomic scientists are returned by the Allies to Berlin. The allies rename the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute after Max Planck, a Nobel Prize winner who first advocated Einstein's Relativity theory. Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg are appointed president and director of the Max Planck Institute: their first action is to send a letter to Germany and the Institute. Einstein refuses to return to Germany.

1952 - Einstein is offered and declines the presidency of Israel.

1953 - He writes, "The Americans have demonstrated in Dresden, Hirosl~ima,a nd Nagasaki that in sheer speed of extermination they surpass even the Nazis."

1954 - "If I wouId be a young man again and had to decide how to make my living, I would not try to become a scientist or scholar or teacher. I would rather choose to be a plumber or a peddler in the hope to find a modest degree of independence. . . "

1955 - Ill with hemolytic anemia, Einstein writes his last phrase: Political passions, aroused everywhere demand their victims. Two days later he suffers an aneurysm. At 1 : 1 5am on April 1 8, Einstein dies after muttering German phrases to his nurse who did not understand him. The body is taken to a hospital to Trenton, where it is cremated the same day. The ashes are scattered at an undisclosed place. The brain, however, had been moved for medical study. Under dissection, Einstein's brain appears to be completely normal.

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