Albert Einstein

Einstein was a patent clerk in Bern in 1905 when he published four papers in a single year, on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity and mass-energy equivalence, any one of which would have made a career. General relativity followed in 1915 and an eclipse expedition confirmed it four years later, which made him famous as no scientist had been. He left Germany in 1933 and never went back. He signed the letter urging Roosevelt to pursue an atomic bomb and afterwards called it the one great mistake of his life. His travel diaries, published in 2018, carry crude racial remarks about Chinese people, which admirers had not seen because the diaries had never been translated.