Fritz Zwicky was born in Verna, Bulgaria, in 1898. He was the son of a Swiss merchant. At the age of six, Zwicky went to Switzerland to see his father's ancestral district, Glarus, for his schooling. Even though he was expected to take up a career in commerce, Fritz had an early passion for science which he persisted to his father to allow him to study engineering instead.
In 1914, Fritz moved to Zürich where he enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. That was when he switched his thoughts to mathematics and experimental physics. He then wrote his examination essay for no one less than Herman Weyl. In 1922, Fritz took his doctorate with a dissertation on ionic crystals. Three years after he had earned this achievement he moved to the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, where he worked with the experimental physicist Robert Millikan.