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You must distinguish between the many different contributions E made to physics. But I assume you mean relativity: special- and general relativity. For special relativity, the time was ripe for its discovery. Several physicists before (Fitzgerald, Lorentz, Poincaré, and several others) already guessed the correct formulas. It was even Poincaré that called the Lorentz transformations that way. But Fitzgerald and Lorentz used more or less ad hoc assumptions to derive them, e.g to explain the null result of the Michelson-Morley experiment. Poincaré's views already circled around the concept of 'relativity', but could not overcome the idea that there is no absolute frame of reference (i.e. a frame that is in absolute rest). E had some help of friends, but their role was more or less that of a 'resonance board'. Explaining his views and problems, E came at the solution himself. It is different in general relativity. E saw an inconsistency between his own theory of special relativity and Newton's law of gravity. He discovered after a few years that he needed descriptions of curved spaces, and asked his old friend Marcel Grossman how curved spaces could be described mathematically, and it was he who introduced E to differential geometry, of which E found that it was 'notoriously difficult'. in 1915, E got stuck, and visited David Hilbert, a specialist in differential geometry. After their discussion E found the solution in a few weeks, at more or less the same time as Hilbert found it too. But Hilbert later said, humorously, 'Every street boy in Göttingen knows more about differential geometry than Einstein: but Einstein had the physical intuitions that led him to the right formulation of the problem'. There are articles in Wikipedia about the development of the 2 RTs: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_general_relativity