Person Requesting Student Must Be Younger Than 18 Years: Fill & Download for Free

Great question. My initial knee-jerk ‘what should be right’ answer was, of course, everyone has the right to see their medical records.I was wrong, and the more I thought about all the legal things not-provided to minors within American society, it became clear that “minors do not have the right to view their own medical records without their parent or guardian requesting them on their behalf.”In general, U.S. Law gives every adult citizen the right to see, get copies of, and sometimes even petition to change their own medical records. However, if you are younger than 18 years, this request must be done on your behalf by your legal parent or guardian.Minors, as far as the U.S. Law goes are actually treated much more like ‘property’ of the parent or guardian than distinctive entities protected by that same U.S. Law. There are manners of ‘freeing’ yourself from this ‘property’ application through applying for emancipation - this varies State to State.If you want to learn more about it: A Teenager's Guide to EmancipationThe flip-side of the right to see something would be the right to keep others from seeing that information. HIPAA - or (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996) is United States legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information.How does the HIPAA Privacy Rule apply to minors?Patient privacy is just as important for children under the age of 18 as it is for adults. However, health care providers must follow certain stipulations under the HIPAA Privacy rule when handling the protected health information of these individuals.Before a child reaches the age of legal adulthood, which is 18 years old in most states, he cannot legally exercise his rights granted by the HIPAA Privacy Rule. Minors’ parents or guardians act as personal representatives under special patient considerations. The most important thing to note is that the Privacy Rule grants parents access to their children’s medical records. As such, a health care provider handing over sensitive information about a patient under the age of 18 to his parent would not be in violation of the law.Generally, covered entities should treat parents - and all personal representatives - as they would the individual whom the person represents. The guardians of minors have the same rights as the patient. As such, beyond granting access to the patient’s medical record, health care providers must also let these representatives know about the release of PHI, authorize disclosures and make decisions on the patient’s behalf.There are certain circumstances in which a child’s parent is not his personal representative, and release of information to the parent in this situation would constitute a violation. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, a doctor should not consider a parent the personal representative when:A parent agrees that the minor and health care provider may have a confidential relationship.Parental consent for care is not required under law.A court provides direction for care or appoints an individual to care for the minor.Additionally, as with all personal representatives, a doctor can use his discretion in determining whether passing on information to a parent would be beneficial to the patient. If the health care provider suspects the guardian neglects the child or subjects him to abuse, for example, the physician may refuse to continue treating the parent as a personal representative.Soure: HIPAA Help Center - PrivacyThat is probably not the answer you wanted to hear for asking that question. The world is not fair to children in many respects. Believe me, the world is not fair to adults either… do not try to grow up too quickly… with the freedom to do and see everything an adult sees comes the exact same liability for everything you see, do, touch or interact with as an adult.~ChrisDr. Christopher YeringtonColumbus, OhioBio: Retired from clinical anesthesiology by a disability in 2010, Dr. Yerington has turned his love of teaching and service to others to his family, medical colleagues and community. He speaks, writes and educates medical groups and residency programs about the importance of great disability and life insurance, basic physician-financial literacy and work-life balance. Chris also consoles and counsels young doctors on stress, burnout and physician-suicide. Having attended law and business schools, Chris is a perpetual student of human life, a scientist and an optimistic futurist in his heart.

“To render the study of the language so easy as to make its acquisition mere play to the learner.To enable the learner to make direct use of his knowledge with persons of any nationality, whether the language be universally accepted or not; in other words, the language is to be directly a means of international communication.To find some means of overcoming the natural indifference of mankind, and disposing them, in the quickest manner possible, and en masse, to learn and use the proposed language as a living one, and not only in last extremities, and with the key at hand.”- L. L. Zamenhof’s goals for Esperanto, Unua Libro, 1887The Verda Stelo, or “Green Star”: the flag of the Esperanto language and movement. Image from Wikipedia (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.svg).rubs hands togetherSay you wanted a single, universal language that a significant percentage of people would speak. Nowadays that language is English - to an extent - but that’s a very recent development.Up until a few decades ago, you couldn’t expect to be able to go anywhere and find someone who spoke your language. This made the idea of a worldwide lingua franca - i.e., a language that everyone would know as a second language - a popular dream, but for most people it was no more than that.However, more than a few hopeful souls struggled to defy that impossibility. There were three major problems facing every one of them:Which language?How do you get everyone to speak that language?How will you get that language to stop changing?The first is easy, the second is infinitely harder, and the third is virtually impossible.Let’s start with that first step: you need to choose which language you’re going to propose as the world’s second tongue. This is called your auxiliary language, or “auxlang”.This is a lot harder than it sounds. Most universal-language-proponents (“auxlangers”) agreed that the language should be easy, but what is easy for a Russian would be difficult for an Italian, and certainly for a Chinese or Indian. There are 7000 languages in hundreds of families scattered across Earth; finding a language universally easy to learn is, well, hard.Another part of this process is the culture that comes attached to the language. No natural language exists as a blank, purely linguistic entity: if I claim Italian to be the best choice for a global auxlang, I’m giving native Italian speakers a head start. I may even be claiming Italian is the objectively best language, or that Italian culture is the objectively best culture.So you need a language that is a.) as easy as possible, and b.) with little to no culture attached to it. The only languages that can fit this category are artificial, manually constructed languages - conlangs for short.“Auxlang” usually refers to a conlang intended as a universal language, so this is the sense I’m using it from now on. Virtually no auxlangs ever gain more than a handful of speakers, for the second and more difficult problem: you need to convince the world to speak your tongue. A universal language needs to be, well, universal, and that’s a woefully hard thing to accomplish.The first such auxlang was called Volapük.The Volapük flag. Image from Wikipedia.At its height, Volapük had 25 magazines and newspapers, 316 textbooks spanning dozens of languages, three conferences (the first two in German and the final one entirely in Volapük), and 283 clubs, all either in or about the language.Its inventor, a German priest named Johann Martin Schleyer, created it after having a dream in which God told him to make a universal language. As he later recounted,In a somehow mysterious and mystical way, in a dark night in the rectory of Litzelstetten, near Constance, in the corner room of the second floor overlooking the yard, while I was vividly reflecting on the follies, grievances, afflictions, and woes of our time, the whole edifice of my international language suddenly appeared before my spiritual eyes in all its splendor. To pay tribute to the truth, and let her bear witness, I must say that on the night of March 1879, I was very tired; thus I can only proclaim with all gratitude and humility that I owe to my good genius the whole system of the international language Volapük. In March 31, 1879, I set up to compile and write down for the first time the principles of the grammar.[1]Schleyer worked on Volapük - whose name comes from vol, “world”, and pük, “speech” or “language” - for just a year before releasing a book in 1880.Volapük quickly picked up speakers, who formed clubs to talk to others who were learning the language. Periodicals sprouted up, textbooks were written and translated, and within five years there were hundreds of thousands of speakers centred mostly in Europe - some estimates put it as high as a million.And then the third of the Auxlang Problems arose and tore Volapük apart.The third problem, the one of getting the language to remain as-is and relatively unchanging, is an important one if you’re expecting the language to last for long. There are two forms this problem can take:The language changes naturally, eventually splitting into dialects and then even further into new languages. All languages do this, especially if they’re spoken over a wide area. Auxlangs aren’t immune, but since so few of them ever reach a point where they can evolve naturally, this version of the problem rarely happens.The language is artificially “improved” by people who believe it’s an imperfect language that would do much better with some revisions. This happens much, much more often.Besides a few insane members of society, no one would ever think of artificially “improving” English. You might want to make its spelling system better, sure, but you wouldn’t manually edit the language itself so that there were fewer verbs or a better word order or anything like that. Even if you did try to, it would never, ever catch on.This does not apply to auxlangs. If you create a language that you claim is ideal for international use, someone’s going to find problems with it and make a “reformed” version of the language. Auxlangs have fewer speakers, too, so the changes would be accepted more readily, and soon you have a mess.The Third Volapük International Congress was held in Paris...The delegates—speaking to one another entirely in Volapük, remember—voted to establish an International Academy to govern the language's future. They elected a French-speaking Dutchman, Auguste Kerckhoffs, as the academy's president...They couldn't know that they had gone too far, or that their language would soon fall apart.Kerckhoffs was the author of a popular Volapük grammar. He believed that Volapük was too complicated—not unreasonably, given that, by combining prefixes and suffixes, you could make as many as 504,440 forms from a single verb. Kerckhoffs proposed reducing the number of noun cases and verb tenses, which would have simplified things considerably. But Father Schleyer would not allow anyone to change the language he had created at God's behest. He demanded the right to veto the academy's decisions; Kerckhoffs refused, and they fought for control of the language until Kerckhoffs resigned from the academy in 1891. Schleyer, meanwhile, had decided that no one but him should have any say in Volapük at all; he formed his own academy, composed entirely of people who agreed with him.The Volapükists didn't know whom to support. Some local societies sided with Schleyer, others with Kerckhoffs. Worse, now that Kerckhoffs had pointed out a few of Volapük's flaws, everyone wanted to tinker with the language. Because Schleyer retained absolute control over Volapük, their only recourse was to invent languages of their own. Dialects multiplied: The years 1893-1907 saw the emergence of Dil, Veltparl, Dilpok, Idiom neutral, Lingua european, and Idiom neutral reformed, all of them derived from Volapük.[2]The “improved” languages ripped the Volapük community apart. Should we stick with Schleyer’s original, Kerckhoffs’s reformed, or any of the other new varieties of the language? The periodicals, textbooks, and clubs fought internally about this. They either split apart or changed their language of choice to a new auxlang on the market.Watching all of this happen was a man who had been working on an international language of his own. His name was Ludwik Lejzer Zamenhof, and he was about to change the world.A portrait of Zamenhof painted during the height of the early Esperanto movement. Image from WIkipedia.L. L. Zamenhof was born on December 15, 1859, into a world of violence and streets quite literally running with blood. There were fights between groups and with the authorities: while his hometown of Białystok is now in eastern Poland, at the time it was part of the Russian Empire, who among other things forbade Polish from being spoken publicly.In an 1895 letter, he wrote thatthe place where I was born and spent my childhood gave direction to all my future struggles. In Białystok the inhabitants were divided into four distinct elements: Russians, Poles, Germans and Jews; each of these spoke their own language and looked on all the others as enemies. In such a town a sensitive nature feels more acutely than elsewhere the misery caused by language division and sees at every step that the diversity of languages is the first, or at least the most influential, basis for the separation of the human family into groups of enemies. I was brought up as an idealist; I was taught that all people were brothers, while outside in the street at every step I felt that there were no people, only Russians, Poles, Germans, Jews and so on. This was always a great torment to my infant mind, although many people may smile at such an “anguish for the world” in a child. Since at that time I thought that “grown-ups” were omnipotent, so I often said to myself that when I grew up I would certainly destroy this evil.Zamenhof believed that the key to unity among the peoples of the world would be a shared means of communication - a universal language, in other words.He learned over a dozen languages to varying degrees of fluency: his native languages were Yiddish, as his family was Jewish, and Belorussian, at the time considered a dialect of Russian. He learned Polish, French, and German at a young age, too, so within a few years of his birth he could speak to any of those four warring groups mentioned in the letter above. Later on when he was in school, he also acquired Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and Aramaic.Despite his multilingualism, his dream of a universal language never weakened - if anything, it fueled it even more. He began with the idea of a simplified Latin or Greek, but soon decided that would be much harder than making a new language from scratch.Beginning in his teens, Zamenhof spent the next years looking through dictionaries and grammars for ideas, for features the languages shared. If you take words from the world’s most common languages, you can maximize the ease of learning this new language.One of his “eureka” moments came from seeing how affixes worked. In German, for example, a place where a Bäcker (“baker”) works is a Bäckerei - the suffix -ei meaning “place”.If you were to have a language that made extensive use of affixes, you could shorten the time needed to learn words in that language: why learn separate words for “good” and “bad” or “beautiful” and “ugly” when you could learn “good” and “notgood” or “beautiful” and “notbeautiful” instead?11 of Esperanto’s 40-ish main affixes. Image from here.The second realization came from learning English. Most European languages have complex verbal systems with conjugations based on person and mood and such. English, however, has lost those complex conjugations, so instead of having a different form of “eat” for every pronoun we can say “I eat”, “you eat”, “they eat”, and so on.If you were to have a language that had only half a dozen main verb forms instead of 50–60 as in Spanish (or 500 000 as in Volapük), you could do away with almost all the time spent learning conjugations in other languages.The conjugation of esti, “to be”. As with all Esperanto verbs, esti is completely regular; once you known this pattern, you can conjugate every last Esperanto verb immediately.Eventually, he came up with Lingwe uniwersala, which was quite similar to modern Esperanto, albeit with some affixes shuffled around and the lack of the hat letters (ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ) and the w used instead of v. On December 17, 1878, a little under a year before Volapük’s publication, Zamenhof revealed his work to some friends at his 19th birthday party, where it was well-received.His father, a censor for the Tsarist government, disapproved of his son’s Lingwe. He worried Ludwik would get too attached to it, and more seriously that the authorities would prosecute him.When the younger Zamenhof went off to medical school at his parents’ request to become an ophthalmologist, his father burned every last book, list, and note of Lingwe uniwersala…and just about succeeded.The sole survivor was a single poem. In it, you can see both Esperanto’s early structure and Zamenhof’s desires for the future.Malamikete de las nacjesKadó, kadó, jam temp' está!La tot' homoze in familjeKonunigare so debá.Or, in English:Animosity (lit. “not-friendliness”) of the nationsFall, fall, the time is already here!All humanity in a familyMust unite.It was certainly not his first writing in the Proto-Esperanto language, but it’s the only one that we have record of - and, of course, it was certainly not the last. In a way, it was good that the elder Zamenhof burned those notes, since it gave Ludwik more time to work on and improve his language.It was now the mid-1880s. Zamenhof’s language (now known as Internacia lingvo) had spent the better part of the decade, the better part of his life, evolving in an incubator of ink and paper - it was ready.Zamenhof created “Internacia Lingvo” to be completely and entirely regular. There are twenty-eight letters: the twenty-six of the basic Latin alphabet, minus q, w, x, and y, plus ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, and ŭ - the “hat” letters, or ĉapeloj. Each letter makes one sound and one sound only.All nouns end in -o; all adjectives end in -a; all adverbs end in -e. Verbs end in: past tense, -is; present-tense, -as; and future tense, -os; infinitives end in -i; imperatives (commands) end in -u. Plurals are formed with -j (pronounced “y”, so birdoj “birds” sounds like “beerdoy”).The accusative (thing that is having something done directly to it) is formed with an -n, which changes La birdo flugis en la domo (“The bird flew in the house”) to La birdo flugis en la domon (“The bird flew into the house”). Adjectives also take the plural and accusative, i.e., La birdoj flugis en la bluajn domojn (“The birds flew into the blue houses”).Roots can be compounded and/or have affixes attached to them. Take the root lern-, which, not too surprisingly, means “learn”. Lerni, “to learn”, is formed by giving it the infinitive; lernejo (lern-ej-o; learn + place + noun) is “school”; lernulo is “learner”; a lernejanto is, literally, “a member of a place of learning”, or “[school] student”. “Father” is patro; add the feminine suffix -in to get patrino, “mother”.After two decades of development, the Internacia Lingvo was published on July 26, 1887, in the form of a book entitled Unua Libro, literally “first book”. It contained a guide to learning the language, a dictionary of 700 root words, some short writings, and letters to send to your friends to get them to learn Internacia Lingvo.Zamenhof, fearing the Tsarist censors, decided to publish the book under a pseudonym. The name he chose had a bit more of an effect on the history of his language than he had intended.Remember Zamenhof’s motivations for making Internacia Lingvo: he was a man who hoped the world would become a better place, and his contribution to that movement was his lingvo. The word for “hope” in the language was (and still is) esperi; the affix for “one who does” is -ant; finally, all nouns end in -o.The Unua Libro lists its author as “Doktoro Esperanto” - literally “Doctor One-Who-Hopes”.The original Polish edition of Unua Libro. Image from here.The people who began learning Internacia Lingvo called it “Doctor Esperanto’s language”, quickly shortened to simply “Esperanto”. Being much catchier than “Internacia Lingvo”, the name stuck.It was precisely at this time that Volapük was dying. The community around it was on fire trying to figure out what to do. Should we stick with Schleyer’s original, Kerckhoffs’s reformed, or any of the other new varieties of the language? The periodicals, textbooks, and clubs fought internally about this. They either split apart……or, they thought, look at this new language. It’s better-made, easier to learn, and has a snazzy name. Instead of fighting over the best version of Volapük, why not learn Internacia Lingvo/Esperanto instead? It’s not like it’ll take us very long to learn anyway.This “Volapük exodus” found itself with the perfect replacement. Esperanto’s speaker count, at first stagnant, shot up: the second Auxlang Problem was on its way to being overcome. There could not have been a better time to release the language.In 1889, the trilingual (German-French-Esperanto) newspaper La Esperantisto put out its first issue. Image from here.Zamenhof had already thought about the third Auxlang Problem. Where Schleyer’s hubris had destroyed Volapük, Zamenhof avoided the issue before it ever came up by giving up all rights to Esperanto: no longer could he officially make any changes. Besides some minor modifications in the later Dua Libro, the language of Unua Libro is the language spoken today.1905 was the year of the first Esperanto World Congress, held in Boulogne-sur-Mer, France. In the 18 years since Unua Libro’s publication, there had been nothing short of an explosion in Esperanto clubs, books, plays, and music. As the psychologist and Esperantist Claude Piron later said,Even the very first brochure about Esperanto contained a poem. From the beginning, people saw how richly and beautifully they could express themselves in Esperanto; it's indeed a language that makes you feel free. So, they started to use it artistically. Thus was born a literature richer than that of many languages in the first century of their existence.La Espero, the Esperanto anthem. The lyrics are from one of Zamenhof’s poems; the music was written by the composer Félicien Menu de Ménil.The spread of Esperanto clubs in Europe in 1905. Image from Wikipedia.The first Universala Kongreso, Boulogne-sur-Mer, France, 1905.At that first Congress, Zamenhof decided he wanted to make some things clear about Esperanto and Esperantism. These five things together are known as the Declaration of Boulogne.Esperanto is a neutral language. It is not supposed to replace all languages, only to “give to people of different nations the ability to understand each other”.Esperanto is the best auxlang. [See Auxiliary Problem #1]Anyone can use Esperanto for any reason they like.The Fundamento de Esperanto (a prescriptive grammar of Esperanto) is the only definite authority over Esperanto. No one can change the Fundamento for any reason; if they do, then the resulting language is not Esperanto. [See Auxiliary Problem #3]“An Esperantist is a person who knows and uses the language Esperanto with complete exactness, for whatever aim he uses it for. Membership in an active Esperantist social circle or organisation is recommended for all Esperantists, but is not obligatory.”[3]Esperanto has changed considerably from the Fundamento over the past 100 years, as it’s a living and therefore changing language. This document would, however, help protect the language from its deviant “child”.The Ido flag. Image from Wikipedia.After a series of communication problems at the 1900 World’s Fair, the Delegation for the Adoption of an International Auxiliary Language (DAIAL) was founded to find a definite solution to solve Auxlang Problem #1. They had no ability to actually enforce a solution for Problem #2, but that was of no concern to them; despite having only a dozen members and no authority, they were sure the world would listen to their decisions.Their conditions:It must be capable of serving the needs of science, in addition to everyday life, commerce and general communication,It must be able to be easily learned by all people of average education, and especially those of the civilized nations of Europe, andIt must not be a living language.(Regarding point 2: keep in mind that this was 1907.)Esperanto was an early candidate and obvious choice: it was easy to learn, already had plenty of speakers, was based primarily on European languages, and was a politically neutral language. People at this time really believed, hoped, that it would unite humanity.“Esperantists” were often both Esperantists in the sense that they spoke Esperanto and in the sense that they were “people who hoped”. The first decade of the 20th century was a political environment in which WWI was inevitable, but couldn’t you hope something better would happen?Esperanto had attracted a hippie-like, peace-loving culture that expanded and evolved within the first decade of the movement’s existence. They wore green stars and clothes after the language’s green flag, attended club meetings and conventions, and sang La Espero, the official anthem of Esperanto penned by Zamenhof and composed by Félicien Menu de Ménil.One of those Esperantistoj. Image from here.The DAIAL agreed to promote Esperanto - under a few conditions. The Delegation’s members were dry academics with no interest in green-spangled turn-of-century hippies. First, they said to Zamenhof, get rid of the more colourful members of your movement.Second, while Esperanto is alright, it’s more foreign-looking (read: not as much like French) than we would like. What’s with the feminine suffix -in? Why is “mother” literally “father-feminine-noun”? Why a -j, of all things, for a plural? An accusative case - really? A fully regular verbal system? Non-Indo-European words? What sort of a language is this?! Its inventor wasn’t a linguist, he was an eye doctor! Let us fix up some of Esperanto’s frayed edges, and we’ll unite the world.In Zamenhof’s eyes, the DAIAL was asking him to kill his culture and tear up the Fundamento. He would have none of this: if he went through with it, history would repeat and Esperanto would die as quickly as Volapük.Doctor Esperanto said no.The Delegation didn’t care. If you won’t let us reform your version of Esperanto, we’ll make our own, better Esperanto! They called it Ido, Esperanto for “offspring”, and set to work fixing up a new world language.The result was something known in Esperanto lore as the Schism. Several high-ranking members of the Esperanto community defected - in fact, the one who was supposed to represent the language, Louis de Beaufront, had spearheaded the Ido movement.Louis de Beaufront. Image from Wikipedia.A language can’t truly thrive without an accompanying culture. Zamenhof recognized this; the Delegation did not: the motto of the first (and only) Ido World Conference was “We Are Here To Work, Not Amuse Ourselves”. In other words, Ido started off by failing Auxlang Problem #2: it began with very little incentive other than “the language itself is an improved Esperanto”.The second thing that Zamenhof recognized but the DAIAL didn’t was that auxlangs are susceptible to Auxlang Problem #3. Ido claimed to be an improved Esperanto, but it very obviously wasn’t perfect. Who’s to say you can’t improve Ido just a wee little bit…?The Idists didn't know whom to support. Some local societies sided with the DAIAL, who continued editing and arguing amongst itself about how to improve Ido; others with the Ido-reformers. The story that had been told of Volapük was now told of Ido.In the end, only perhaps 15% of the Esperanto community defected, and many of them later returned, having gotten sick of the infighting. Esperanto had stumbled, but it was growing still. Maybe, just maybe, the Great War looming over Europe wouldn’t happen.Maybe Esperanto could help stop it.Ludwik Lazarus Zamenhof died on April 14th, 1917. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize no less than twelve times.Esperanto never became a truly universal language. It stopped neither the first World War nor the Second.It has not failed, however. Esperantujo - the cultural entity that forms a sort of “Esperanto nation” - can be found in solid form in Esperanto clubs across the world; many countries have an official Esperanto Association.Esperantujo. Image from Wikipedia.The Pasporta Servo, or “Passport Service” in English, is a system in which Esperantists can stay at other Esperantists’ houses for little to free, in a system akin to CouchSurfing.While the idea of offering hospitality to travelers in such a fashion dates back to ancient Greece and the idea of applying it just to Esperanto was first thought of in 1966, the Pasporta first began in 1972, with the publication of its first periodical, which listed 40 hosts. There are now over 1450 hosts in 91 countries, mostly concentrated in Europe (right), and the magazine is one of the most popular Esperanto publications, second only to the illustrated dictionary.Like Esperantujo, hosts can be found around the globe:Image from Wikipedia.Today, Esperanto has between 100 000 and 2 000 000 speakers to some degree, as well as between 500 and 1000 families speaking Esperanto, for about 2000 native Esperantists.Most attempted changes to Esperanto have been rejected by the community (see: Ido), but some have simply occurred naturally, such as the loss of ĥ in many words or the increased use of the verb ŝati.Just how easy is Esperanto to learn? The Institute of Cybernetic Pedagogy at Paderborn, Germany, performed a study on how long it took for natively French-speaking students to learn certain languages to a level comparable to that of their native tongue. The results: It took 2000 hours to learn German, 1500 hours to learn English, 1000 hours for Italian, and 150 hours for Esperanto.Esperanto is not a magical language. It’s not objectively better than any other, or more fit for learning. Few nowadays believe it will become internacia lingvo proper.But it’s an excellent language with a fantastic history and culture, and if for no other reason I wholeheartedly recommend it.If you would like to learn Esperanto, Duolingo offers an excellent course here. See this answer.Thank you for asking!Footnotes[1] Volapük — Wikipédia[2] Volapük, a dying language that never got to live...[3] Boulogne Declaration

1. Einstein Was a Fat Baby with Large HeadWhen Albert’s mother, Pauline Einstein gave birth to him, she thought that Einstein's head was so big and misshapen that he was deformed!As the back of the head seemed much too big, the family initially considered a monstrosity. The physician, however, was able to calm them down and some weeks later the shape of the head was normal. When Albert's grandmother saw him for the first time she is reported to have muttered continuously "Much too fat, much too fat!" Contrasting all apprehensions Albert grew and developed normally except that he seemed a bit slow.2. Einstein Had Speech Difficulty as a ChildEarliest Known Photo of Albert Einstein (Image credit: Albert Einstein Archives,The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel)As a child, Einstein seldom spoke. When he did, he spoke very slowly - indeed, he tried out entire sentences in his head (or muttered them under his breath) until he got them right before he spoke aloud. According to accounts, Einstein did this until he was nine years old. Einstein's parents were fearful that he was retarded - of course, their fear was completely unfounded!One interesting anecdote, told by Otto Neugebauer, a historian of science, goes like this:As he was a late talker, his parents were worried. At last, at the supper table one night, he broke his silence to say, "The soup is too hot."Greatly relieved, his parents asked why he had never said a word before.Albert replied, "Because up to now everything was in order."3. Einstein was Inspired by a CompassWhen Einstein was five years old and sick in bed, his father showed him something that sparked his interest in science: a compass.When Einstein was five years old and ill in bed one day, his father showed him a simple pocket compass. What interested young Einstein was whichever the case was turned, the needle always pointed in the same direction. He thought there must be some force in what was presumed empty space that acted on the compass. This incident, common in many "famous childhoods," was reported persistently in many of the accounts of his life once he gained fame.4. Einstein Failed his University Entrance ExamIn 1895, at the age of 17, Albert Einstein applied for early admission into the Swiss Federal Polytechnical School (Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule or ETH). He passed the math and science sections of the entrance exam, but failed the rest (history, languages, geography, etc.)! Einstein had to go to a trade school before he retook the exam and was finally admitted to ETH a year later.5. Einstein had an Illegitimate ChildIn the 1980s, Einstein's private letters revealed something new about the genius: he had an illegitimate daughter with a fellow former student Mileva Marić (whom Einstein later married).In 1902, a year before their marriage, Mileva gave birth to a daughter named Lieserl, whom Einstein never saw and whose fate remained unknown:Mileva gave birth to a daughter at her parents’ home in Novi Sad. This was at the end of January, 1902 when Einstein was in Berne. It can be assumed from the content of the letters that birth was difficult. The girl was probably christianised. Her official first name is unknown. In the letters received only the name “Lieserl” can be found.The further life of Lieserl is even today not totally clear. Michele Zackheim concludes in her book “Einstein’s daughter” that Lieserl was mentally challenged when she was born and lived with Mileva’s family. Furthermore she is convinced that Lieserl died as a result of an infection with scarlet fever in September 1903. From the letters mentioned above it can also be assumed that Lieserl was put up for adoption after her birth.In a letter from Einstein to Mileva from September 19, 1903, Lieserl was mentioned for the last time. After that nobody knows anything about Lieserl Einstein-Maric.6. Einstein Became Estranged From His First Wife, then Proposed a Strange "Contract"After Einstein and Mileva married, they had two sons: Hans Albert and Eduard. Einstein's academic successes and world travel, however, came at a price - he became estranged from his wife. For a while, the couple tried to work out their problems - Einstein even proposed a strange "contract" for living together with Mileva:The relationship progressed. Einstein became estranged from his wife. The biography reprints a chilling letter from Einstein to his wife, a proposed "contract" in which they could continue to live together under certain conditions. Indeed that was the heading: "Conditions."A. You will make sure1. that my clothes and laundry are kept in good order;2. that I will receive my three meals regularly in my room;3. that my bedroom and study are kept neat, and especially that my desk is left for my use only.B. You will renounce all personal relations with me insofar as they are not completely necessary for social reasons...There's more, including "you will stop talking to me if I request it." She accepted the conditions. He later wrote to her again to make sure she grasped that this was going to be all-business in the future, and that the "personal aspects must be reduced to a tiny remnant." And he vowed, "In return, I assure you of proper comportment on my part, such as I would exercise to any woman as a stranger."7. Einstein Didn't Get Along with His Oldest SonAfter the divorce, Einstein's relationship with his oldest son, Hans Albert, turned rocky. Hans blamed his father for leaving Mileva, and after Einstein won the Nobel Prize and money, for giving Mileva access only to the interest rather than the principal sum of the award - thus making her life that much harder financially.The row between the father and son was amplified when Einstein strongly objected to Hans Albert marrying Frieda Knecht:In fact, Einstein opposed Hans's bride in such a brutal way that it far surpassed the scene that Einstein's own mother had made about Mileva. It was 1927, and Hans, at age 23, fell in love with an older and - to Einstein - unattractive woman. He damned the union, swearing that Hans's bride was a scheming woman preying on his son. When all else failed, Einstein begged Hans to not have children, as it would only make the inevitable divorce harder. ... (Source: Einstein A to Z by Karen C. Fox and Aries Keck, 2004)Later, Hans Albert immigrated to the United States became a professor of Hydraulic Engineering at UC Berkeley. Even in the new country, the father and son were apart. When Einstein died, he left very little inheritance to Hans Albert.8. Einstein was a Ladies' ManEinstein with his second wife and cousin, Elsa (Image credit)After Einstein divorced Mileva (his infidelity was listed as one of the reasons for the split), he soon married his cousin Elsa Lowenthal. Actually, Einstein also considered marrying Elsa's daughter (from her first marriage) Ilse, but she demurred:Before marrying Elsa, he had considered marrying her daughter, Ilse, instead. According to Overbye, “She (Ilse, who was 18 years younger than Einstein) was not attracted to Albert, she loved him as a father, and she had the good sense not to get involved. But it was Albert’s Woody Allen moment.” (Source)Unlike Mileva, Elsa Einstein's main concern was to take care of her famous husband. She undoubtedly knew about, and yet tolerated, Einstein's infidelity and love affairs which were later revealed in his letters:Previously released letters suggested his marriage in 1903 to his first wife Mileva Maric, mother of his two sons, was miserable. They divorced in 1919, and he soon married his cousin, Elsa. He cheated on her with his secretary, Betty Neumann.In the new volume of letters released on Monday by Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Einstein described about six women with whom he spent time and from whom he received gifts while being married to Elsa.Some of the women identified by Einstein include Estella, Ethel, Toni and his "Russian spy lover," Margarita. Others are referred to only by initials, like M. and L."It is true that M. followed me (to England) and her chasing after me is getting out of control," he wrote in a letter to Margot in 1931. "Out of all the dames, I am in fact attached only to Mrs. L., who is absolutely harmless and decent."9. Einstein, the War Pacifist, Urged FDR to Build the Atom BombRe-creation of Einstein and Szilárd signing the famous letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1939. (Image credit: Wikipedia)In 1939, alarmed by the rise of Nazi Germany, physicist Leó Szilárd [wiki] convinced Einstein to write a letter to president Franklin Delano Roosevelt warning that Nazi Germany might be conducting research into developing an atomic bomb and urging the United States to develop its own.The Einstein and Szilárd's letter was often cited as one of the reasons Roosevelt started the secret Manhattan Project [wiki] to develop the atom bomb, although later it was revealed that the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 probably did much more than the letter to spur the government.Although Einstein was a brilliant physicist, the army considered Einstein a security risk and (to Einstein's relief) did not invite him to help in the project.10. The Saga of Einstein's Brain: Pickled in a Jar for 43 Years and Driven Cross Country in a Trunk of a Buick!After his death in 1955, Einstein's brain [wiki] was removed - without permission from his family - by Thomas Stoltz Harvey [wiki], the Princeton Hospital pathologist who conducted the autopsy. Harvey took the brain home and kept it in a jar. He was later fired from his job for refusing to relinquish the organ.Many years later, Harvey, who by then had gotten permission from Hans Albert to study Einstein's brain, sent slices of Einstein's brain to various scientists throughout the world. One of these scientists was Marian Diamond of UC Berkeley, who discovered that compared to a normal person, Einstein had significantly more glial cells in the region of the brain that is responsible for synthesizing information.In another study, Sandra Witelson of McMaster University found that Einstein's brain lacked a particular "wrinkle" in the brain called the Sylvian fissure. Witelson speculated that this unusual anatomy allowed neurons in Einstein's brain to communicate better with each other. Other studies had suggested that Einstein's brain was denser, and that the inferior parietal lobe, which is often associated with mathematical ability, was larger than normal brains.