Worldwide fame burst upon Albert Einstein on November 7, 1919, when British astronomers announced they had found the first confirmation of Einstein’s general relativity theory. Einstein had already become known in scientific circles because of his two astonishing theories: the
special theory of relativity, published in 1905 when he was only twenty-six and a minor clerk in the Swiss patent office, and the general theory of relativity, advanced between 1913 and 1915.