Albert Einstein was born in Ulm in 1879, his father Herman Einstein being a salesman and later manufacturer of electrical equipment operating on direct current (DC). However, he had backed the wrong current and the business went bust.
Young Albert had shown a talent for mathematics and by his early-teens had mastered Euclidean Geometry and Infinitesimal Calculus.
By the time he was 15 his family had moved to Pavia in Italy where young Albert spent two years at the local school.
It was during this period that his “second-greatest blunder” took place. So embarrassed was he about this that it was only discovered in correspondence between his later wife, Mileva Maric, and her mother. He was particularly put out by being upstaged by Sir Isaac Newton.
Every schoolboy in Europe had heard the legend of Newton being inspired by a falling apple to develop his theory of gravity and young Albert was no exception and greatly regretted not following up on an inspiration which he had at age 16.
He had seen some of the early photos of nebulae produced at Mt Wilson, and at this early period it was believed that there was only one galaxy and that all nebulae, including spiral nebulae were artefacts within our own galaxy.
In fact, based on a lifetime of observation Herschel had made a very shrewd guess about the shape of our galaxy which Albert knew of, having read Herschel's papers.
Back in the 19th century, those students’ friends - McDonald’s and KFC - had not been invented, so to make a few lira after school Albert worked a few hours each Friday and Saturday night at the Marco Polo Pizza Parlour.
He observed Pizza bases being rolled, shaped, and decorated and was struck by the fact that the average Pizza not only resembled Herschel's concept of our galaxy but also resembled the edge-on, oblique and full frontal galaxy photos he had seen in the early work of Barnard.
Even some of the burnt edges on overdone Pizzas resembled the dark matter on the edge of “The Sombrero”. Bits of Pepperoni looked like scattered globular clusters, and assorted bits of vegetable matter resembled H-II regions and other nebulae.
It was not until the 1920's when Hubble demonstrated red shift as evidence for spiral nebulae being external island Universes to our own that Einstein realised he could have beaten Hubble - not by demonstrable evidence, but at least in theoretical concepts to the existence of a whole Universe full of galaxies.
Of course, at age 16 he lacked the self confidence of later years and no doubt very rightly realised he would be laughed at as a teenager coming up with such a far-out notion. The moral of this story, reader, is to follow and test out your ideas.