5Things You (Probably) Didn't Know About Einstein

1. He renounced his German citizenship when he was 16.

From an early age, Albert Einstein loathed nationalism of any kind and considered it preferable to be a “citizen of the world.” When he was 16, he renounced his German citizenship and was officially state-less until he became a Swiss citizen in 1901.

2. He married the only female student in his physics class.

Mileva Marić was the only female student in Einstein’s section at Zürich Polytechnic. She was passionate about math and science, and was an aspiring physicist in her own right, but she gave up those ambitions when she married Einstein and became the mother of his children. 

3. He had a 1,427-page FBI file.

In 1933, the FBI began keeping a dossier on Albert Einstein, shortly before his third trip to the U.S. This file would grow into 1,427 pages of documents focused on Einstein’s lifelong association with pacifist and socialist organizations. J. Edgar Hoover even recommended that Einstein be kept out of America by the Alien Exclusion Act, but he was overruled by the U.S. State Department.

4. He paid his first wife his Nobel Prize money for a divorce.

Anticipating winning a Nobel Prize, Einstein offered all his expected prize money to his first wife, Mileva Marić, so she would agree to grant him a divorce. The award added up to $32,250, which was more than ten times the annual salary of the average professor at the time.

5. He had a rocky friendship with “the father of chemical warfare.”

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who helped recruit Einstein to Berlin and would become one of Einstein’s close friends. Haber was Jewish but converted to Christianity, and preached the virtues of assimilation to Einstein before the Nazis came to power. In WWI, he developed a deadly chlorine gas, which was heavier than air and could flow down into the trenches to painfully asphyxiate soldiers by burning through their throats and lungs. Haber is sometimes referred to as the “father of chemical warfare.”