When Einstein Tilted at Windmills
When they met, Einstein wasn’t Einstein yet. He was just Albert Einstein, a kid, about 17, with a dark cloud of teenage angst and a violin. Michele Besso was older, 23, but a kindred spirit. Growing up in Trieste, Italy he had shown an impressive knack for mathematics, but he was kicked out of high school for insubordination and had to go live with his uncle in Rome. Einstein could relate. At the Swiss Polytechnic, where he was now a student, his professors resented his intellectual arrogance, and had begun locking him out of the library out of spite.
Their first encounter was on a Saturday night in Zurich, 1896. They were at Selina Caprotti’s house by the lake for one of her music parties. Einstein was handsome—dark hair, moustache, soulful brown eyes. Besso was short with narrow, pointed features and a thick pile of coarse black hair on his head and chin. Einstein had a look of cool detachment. Besso had the look of a nervous mystic. As they chatted, Einstein learned that Besso worked at an electrical machinery factory; Besso learned that Einstein was studying physics. Perhaps they recognized something in each other then: They both wanted to get to the truth of things.
Besso would go on to become a sidekick, of sorts, to Einstein—a sounding board, as Einstein put it, “the best in Europe,” asking the right questions that would inspire Einstein to find the right answers. At times, though, he would seem to be something more—a collaborator, perhaps, making suggestions, working through calculations.
At other times he’d be the perfect fool—a schlemiel, Einstein called him. Like the time Besso was sent on a job to inspect some newly installed power lines on the outskirts of Milan but missed his train and then forgot to go the following day. On the third day he finally made it to his destination, but by that time he’d completely forgotten what he was supposed to be doing there in the first place. He sent a postcard to his boss: “Instructions should be wired.”
If Besso never seemed to know quite what he was doing, it wasn’t for a lack of smarts. “The great strength of Besso resides in his intelligence,” Einstein would write, “which is out of the ordinary, and in his endless devotion to both his moral and professional obligations; his weakness is his truly insufficient spirit of decision. This explains why his successes