The man who was to answer Poincaré's challenge
within the year--Albert Einstein--was nowhere near St. Louis in 1904.
He was in Bern, Switzerland, holding down a desk job in the federal
capital, a civil service appointment that had just been made permanent
that September. He was grateful to have had two years' steady work at
3,500 Swiss francs annually, enough to get married on in 1903 and
enough to take care of his brand new son. He was even more grateful
that the job left him some time to read theoretical physics (including Bolt-
zmann and Poincaré), and to write a few scientific papers of his own.
Einstein was not yet a Zionist, a genius, or even a great physicist, except
to a small circle of friends in Switzerland who called themselves, with
great good humor, the Olympia Academy, but who were not themselves
physicists. Some of them still came to visit Einstein at his new second-
floor apartment at 49 Kramgasse in Bern. There was his college classmate
Marcel Grossman, for example, a budding professor of mathematics who
had helped Einstein get his job; and Michele Angelo Besso, for whom
Einstein had done the same favor in 1904. There was Maurice Solovine,
who had wandered into Einstein's poverty flat in Bern in 1903 to take
him up on his offer to tutor physics and stayed to become an Olympian;
and Conrad Habicht, now teaching science in the Protestant public
school in Schiers, Graubünden, who had met Einstein in 1901, when
both of them were novice teachers in Schaffhausen. There was also Mi-
leva Maric, another Classmate, who may have thought Einstein was spe-
cial; but Mileva had married him, and that was after she had failed her
exams twice.

Einstein himself was a college graduate, however, with a physics de-
gree and a teaching certificate dated 1900 from the Swiss Federal Institute
of Technology, "ETH," in Zurich. He was also already an exile (like Stein
and Joyce) and already a pacifist. Because the academically elite Luitpold

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