Albert Einstein, the greatest physicist of the 20th century, was born on March 14, 1879, in the city of Ulm in southwest Germany. He moved to Munich with his family a year later. Einstein's parents were both Jewish. His father, Hermann Einstein, and his uncle, Jacob Einstein, jointly opened an electrical appliance factory that produced motors, arc lamps, and electrical instrumentation for power stations and lighting systems. Mother Pauline was a housewife with a secondary education. She loved music very much and taught Einstein to play the violin when he was six years old.

Einstein was not lively when he was a child. He could not speak even when he was more than three years old. His parents were worried that he was mute and took him to a doctor for examination. Fortunately, little Einstein was not mute, but he could not speak very smoothly until he was nine years old. Every word he spoke had to be thought through laboriously but carefully.

When Einstein was four or five years old, he was bedridden and his father gave him a compass. When he found that the compass always pointed in a fixed direction, he was very surprised and felt that there must be something deeply hidden behind this phenomenon. He happily played with the compass for several days and pestered his father and Uncle Jacob with a series of questions. Although he couldn't even pronounce the word "magnetism" well, he stubbornly wanted to know why the compass could guide. This profound and lasting impression could still be vividly recalled by Einstein until he was sixty-seven years old.

When Einstein was in elementary school and middle school, his homework was ordinary. Because he behaves slowly and doesn't like to interact with others, his teachers and classmates don't like him. His Greek and Latin teachers were even more disgusted with him.