If you read Isaacson's biography, it's hard to come away without feeling like Einstein's insights were a product of his time, that he was in some sense no more

If you read Isaacson's biography, it's hard to come away without feeling like Einstein's insights were a product of his time, that he was in some sense no more a vessel than each of us, and that vessel was continuously exchanging contents with others: his father, the family's weekly dinner guest (a local student), the classmates he cribbed notes from, the professors who found him frustrating, the playboy he tutored (and learned to smoke cigars from), his wife, the patent applications on time-keeping devices he read as a Swiss patent clerk (and his train-time-keeping metaphor), his many collaborators (Lorenz perhaps most of all), the early conferences in Paris, etc. I am no Einstein, to be sure, but I do particularly recognize the experience he had as a teen, learning the math and engineering of his father from his father. His father and uncle, it's worth noting, built electric power generators. Mentally building an effective model of fields was surely something Einstein had to learn early, and perhaps without the math first.