One of my enlightening experiences has been to visit the Einstein's house in Bern and walk on the same path that he did every day to get to the patent office. The question in my mind had always been how Einstein suddenly started thinking about synchronizing clocks using light signals out of nowhere? My walk had the answer:

In Bern, you see clocks everywhere! Towers after towers, buildings after buildings have clocks of varying sizes and shapes and artwork. The city of Bern is crazy about having giant clocks all over. In 1905, all these clocks must be manually synchronized and people may have often noticed slight differences as they walked and you cannot not think about synchronization every day!

Inventors in Bern were working on how to synchronize them automatically. One of those patents landed on Einstein's desk which started his thought process on synchronizing clocks using the fastest signals possible, i.e., light. But then things got weird when you think about light signal taking time to arrive. What if the clock is on the railway station and we need to synchronize the clock on the train? Now the train is moving away and the light signal is taking longer and longer. And so the relativity begins... It is very likely that these ideas would not have born if Einstein wasn't in Bern and working in that damn patent office!