40 Little Known Facts about Albert Einstein You Would Have Never Heard of

Albert Einstein was a fan of the children's puppet show, Time for Beany. On one occasion, the physicist interrupted a high-level conference by announcing, "You will have to excuse me, gentlemen. It's Time for Beany."

27. Albert Einstein used the same soap for shaving and washing because of a firm conviction that two kinds of soap needlessly complicate life.

28. In 1916, Albert Einstein wrote an article proposing a more efficient shape for wings. The plane built with his wings barely left the ground.

29. When Albert Einstein arrived in Paris by train in 1922, many high profile reporters, diplomats were waiting for him on the platform. Instead, he sneaked out the back car and off down the tracks, laughing "like a child."

30. Albert Einstein actually had good grades in school, with the highest scores in his A-levels for algebra, geometry, descriptive geometry, history, and physics. His reputation for being bad at school comes from his dislike of school authority, leading to clashes with teachers.

Albert Einstein married his first cousin, Elsa Löwenthal. Not only were their mother's sisters, but their fathers were cousins too, making the married couple second cousins as well. The relationship began while Einstein was still married to his first wife, physicist Mileva Marić.

32. Albert Einstein smoked cigarette butts picked off from the street and went out sailing when there was no wind because it was 'more challenging.'

33. When asked what was the speed of sound Albert Einstein said: "[I do not] carry such information in my mind since it is readily available in books."

34. Albert Einstein was a lousy sailor and he had a boat named "Tinef" which is Yiddish for "little piece of junk.

35. Albert Einstein once had an affair with a Soviet spy named Margarita Konenkova.

Albert Einstein's eyes remain in a safe deposit box in New York City.

37. When Albert Einstein "wanted a divorce from his first wife, he gave her the ultimatum that, if she wanted to remain with him and not grant him a divorce, then he expected her to serve him three meals a day in his room but not expect any intimacy in return."

38. In 1930, Albert Einstein met with fellow Nobel laureate, Indian philosopher Rabindranath Tagore and had a friendly debate. Einstein found that he believed more in absolute truth than the religious man he was debating, leading him to say to Tagore, "Then I am more religious than you are!"

39. Albert Einstein had at least seven extramarital affairs and fathered an illegitimate child.

40. Albert Einstein won his Nobel Prize for his law of the photoelectric effect, not the theory of relativity.