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Albert Einstein
    Albert Einstein was an average guy in his youth, not rich or famous and not known for his academic excellence.  Since he did poorly in school, he was essentially self-taught and began to develop his scientific mind at one of his first jobs as a patent office clerk.

   Working at the patent office, Albert was responsible for determining if the inventions submitted for a patent actually did what they claimed to do.  An invention could not be patented if it didn't work.  In performing his job, Einstein acquired a basic knowledge of mathematics and mechanics.

    In the early 20th century, the concept of  a perpetual motion machine was very popular and many people were submitting patents claiming to have developed one.  None of them actually worked and Einstein began to understand on a personal level that there was a relationship between energy and matter.  Matter could become energy and energy could become matter, but the conservation of matter and energy remains constant.  In other words there is no such thing as perpetual motion.  No free Lunch!

    At this time in history, science became obsessed with measuring things using time and distance, since these measurements were thought to be fixed and immutable.  Scientists were also studying wave motions, and they had determined that all waves were propagated through a physical medium.  They knew that waves of pressure or sound could travel through the water, the earth, or through the air, and the density of the media effected the rate of wave propagation.  For example,  sound travels through air at approximately 720 feet per second; it travels 4 times faster through water and 16 times faster through metal.  In other words, the more densely packed the physical molecules are, the faster things move through that medium.  Still they did not know what the medium was that light traveled through.  They called this mysterious substance the "ether."

    In 1887, physicists Albert Michelson & E.W. Morley conducted a famous experiment in which they tried to make measurements of the ether itself.  The experiment assumed that both the earth and light were moving through the ether and that  the earth was moving  in a particular direction.  Therefore, measurements  taken in one direction would be upstream and downstream in the ether and measurements taken at a 90º angle would be across the "current" of the "ether wind" and would reflect a different rate of wave travel.  So, they measured light beams traveling in the two directions, but were unable to observe any difference in the rate of the light waves.  Their experiment was a failure.  Apparently there was no ether, no ether wind and presumably no medium through which light traveled .