Biography | Albert Einstein — Hired as Technical Expert Class III in This Telegraph Building

On 16 June 1902 the Swiss Federal Council elected Albert Einstein, provisionally, as Technical Expert Class III at the Federal Office for Intellectual Property. The salary was 3,500 francs a year. His first working day was Monday, 23 June 1902. The office then occupied the upper floors of the federal telegraph building at the corner of Speichergasse and Genfergasse. The address today is Speichergasse 6, the Haus der Kantone. He worked in room 86 on the third floor, at a desk and sometimes at a standing lectern, examining whether inventions could be patented. A photograph from about 1904 or 1905 shows him at that lectern. The director, Friedrich Haller, set new clerks an oral and written test that could last two days. Einstein stayed at the office until 1909, when he left for a chair in theoretical physics at the University of Zurich. Sources differ on the exact day of his 1906 promotion to Class II; the salary rose to 4,500 francs. From 1893 to 1907 the patent office shared this telegraph building. In 1907 it moved to the old postal building at Bollwerk 8. The 1905 papers were therefore written while he still climbed these stairs. The building later housed the PTT directorate and Swisscom. Einstein's room was remodelled. The entrance is not a public museum. What a visitor can see is the street corner and the late-nineteenth-century facade. The work itself happened one floor up, in a civil-service room. Photo: Haus der Kantone, Speichergasse 6, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait: Einstein at the patent-office lectern, public domain.