When I was a student in college, Albert Einstein was still alive. My friends and I grew up with the myth of this great man who, the story went, while a clerk, third class, at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern, had emerged from nowhere at age 26 to set down the laws of relativity in a paper so fresh, so novel that not a single other scholar needed to be cited as a source of at least partial inspiration for this monumental paper. Einstein's paper contained no list of references; none had existed or could even be found!

We all aspired to emulate Einstein and write a paper as great as his. To this end it seemed we would need only to foster self-reliance, reject outside influences, and rely solely on an inner intellect.

But in the first half of the twentieth century, the myth could not be dispelled. Historians of science active at the time preferred to write about a distant past. And, as a young man, Einstein himself may have quietly enjoyed the mystique that surrounded his work. Only three times, as far as I am aware – twice late in life – did he describe the road he had traveled, the difficulties with which he had wrestled, and the inspiration the work of others had provided.