Patent Office

I noticed a weird little coincidence recently, that probably doesn't mean anything to anyone but me.  We were watching the episode of 'The Big Bang Theory' in which Sheldon has gotten horribly stuck trying to solve a tricky equation, and realizes he has to turn his mind off in order for the answer to appear.  He reminds everybody who'll listen that Einstein was working in the patent office in Switzerland when he did some of his most groundbreaking work, and decides that he needs to do that kind of 'menial' work in order to engage his cerebral cortex on the problem.  Leaving aside whether that's a valid technique for theoretical research, and whether government clerkship is 'menial' work in the first place, it struck me:  I seemed to remember someone else who had to go to work in the patent office before his big success.

After a little research I confirmed it: one of my favorite writers, the English poet A. E. Housman, blew a big written exam at Oxford in 1892, and had to take a job in the patent office in London because he hadn't gotten his degree.  While working for the government, he pursued his classical studies and published a very well-received volume of poetry titled A Shropshire Lad, and after ten years he was rescued by the University of London, which gave him a professorship in the classics.

Now, Einstein went to work for the government because he couldn't get a job anyplace else, even with his degree, not because he failed a test and wasn't able to get a degree. And obviously there's a big difference between theoretical physics and the writing of poetry, and lots of people, especially these days, would argue that only one of those activities involves real genius. But in his day, which was a few decades before Einstein, Housman became a very big deal, and we shouldn't sneer at what he accomplished just because it isn't science.  Millions of us remember the lines 'When I was one-and-twenty', or 'Loveliest of trees, the cherry  now', or 'With rue my heart is laden'. And my personal favorite of Housman's poems:

          Into my heart an air that kills
          From yon far country blows:
          What are those blue remembered hills,
          What spires, what farms are those?

          That is the land of lost content,
          I see it shining plain,
          The happy highways where I went,
          And cannot come again.

So isn't it weird that both of these guys took a detour into the patent office, before they were ready to prove themselves to the world?  Is working as a clerk really so mindlessly bureaucratic that you can turn your brain off, and let it work on something else even while you're doing your job?