Famous People With Little Schooling Who Changed the World

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Seven Famous People With Little Schooling Who Changed the World

Thomas Edison, Abraham Lincoln, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Charlie Chaplin and Heinrich Schliemann all had very little formal schooling, yet each reshaped his field. Edison spent only a few months in a classroom, Lincoln had less than a year in total, Twain left school at about eleven, Dickens was pulled out to work in a factory at twelve, Chaplin’s education ended by thirteen, and Schliemann went to work as a grocer’s apprentice at fourteen.

What they shared was not a lack of education but a different kind of it: relentless reading, practical work that taught them a trade, and a habit of teaching themselves whatever they needed next. Below are their stories, with some popular legends checked against the record.

Thomas Edison: a few months of school and a lab in the basement

Edison, born in Ohio in 1847 and raised in Port Huron, Michigan, attended school for only a few months. A famous family story says a teacher dismissed him as slow and his mother took him out in anger; the details are hard to verify, but it is certain that his mother Nancy, a former teacher, taught him reading, writing and arithmetic at home. After that he mostly taught himself, reading widely and running chemistry experiments at home.

As a boy he worked as a “news butcher” on trains between Port Huron and Detroit, selling newspapers, snacks and vegetables. He even printed his own small paper, the Grand Trunk Herald, which ran for 24 issues. He picked up telegraphy by watching operators, worked night shifts as a telegrapher for years, and received his first patent, for an electric vote recorder, in 1869. Hearing problems that began around age twelve left him partly deaf, which he later claimed helped him concentrate.

His reputation rests on the phonograph of 1877, a commercially practical incandescent lamp in 1879 and the Pearl Street power station in New York, which began supplying electricity on 4 September 1882. He did not invent the electric light or the telephone from scratch; he and his team improved existing ideas and, crucially, built systems that worked at scale. His name appears on 1,093 US patents, not the 2,500 often claimed. He is widely credited with saying genius is “one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration,” though the wording varies between sources.

Abraham Lincoln: a self-taught lawyer and president

Lincoln was the son of Thomas Lincoln, a farmer and carpenter in Kentucky and later Indiana. His formal education came from travelling teachers in short bursts and added up to less than twelve months by the time he was fifteen. Farm work filled the rest of his days, and he read whatever books he could borrow.

As a young man in Illinois he taught himself law, borrowing texts such as Blackstone’s Commentaries, and later remarked that he had studied with nobody. He was admitted to the Illinois bar on 9 September 1836. Opponents sometimes mocked his frontier background, but his clear, plain writing became one of his greatest political strengths.

As president, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on 1 January 1863. It declared enslaved people free in the Confederate states then in rebellion, not in loyal border states; slavery was abolished nationwide by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865. Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth at Ford’s Theatre on 14 April 1865, five days after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox. Booth was a Confederate sympathiser, and historians link his decision to kill partly to Lincoln’s speech of 11 April supporting limited voting rights for Black Americans.

Mark Twain: the printer’s apprentice who became America’s humorist

Samuel Langhorne Clemens grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, the river town that later became the model for St. Petersburg in his novels. His father died of pneumonia in 1847, when Samuel was eleven, and he soon left school after the fifth grade. In 1848 he became a printer’s apprentice, a job that put him in front of words every day, and in the evenings he educated himself in public libraries.

He later trained as a Mississippi steamboat pilot under Horace Bixby. That career gave him his pen name: “mark twain” was the leadsman’s call for water two fathoms deep, safe for a steamboat. After a failed attempt at silver mining in Nevada he joined the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City, where he first signed himself Mark Twain in 1863 and developed his deadpan comic style.

His tall tale about a jumping frog made him nationally known in 1865. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer followed in 1876 and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884–85. Twain never became a professor, as some retellings claim, but universities honoured the man who had left school so young: Yale gave him an honorary doctorate in 1901, the University of Missouri in 1902 and Oxford in 1907.

Charles Dickens: from a blacking factory to the world’s bookshelves

Dickens had a few happy years of schooling in Chatham, Kent, and devoured novels such as Robinson Crusoe, Tom Jones and The Arabian Nights. Then his family’s finances collapsed. In 1824 his father was imprisoned for debt in the Marshalsea prison in London, and his mother and younger siblings moved in with him, as families often did.

Charles, about twelve, was sent to lodge alone and work ten-hour days at Warren’s blacking warehouse, pasting labels on pots of boot polish for six shillings a week. The experience marked him for life and fed his anger at child labour and poverty in books such as Oliver Twist and David Copperfield. After an inheritance freed his father, Charles returned to school at Wellington House Academy, which he judged a poor school with a harsh headmaster, and left in 1827 at about fifteen.

From then on, work was his university. He became a solicitor’s clerk, taught himself shorthand, and worked as a court and parliamentary reporter. His newspaper sketches became Sketches by Boz in 1836, and The Pickwick Papers made him famous the same year.

Charlie Chaplin: workhouse child to film pioneer

Chaplin was born in London in 1889 to two music-hall performers, Hannah and Charles Chaplin. His father, a heavy drinker, left the family and died in 1901 at 38. His mother struggled with poverty and mental illness and was committed to Cane Hill asylum in 1898, when Charlie was nine.

At seven he was sent to the Lambeth workhouse and then to a school for pauper children, and he passed through such institutions twice before he was nine. He did receive some schooling, including while touring with a clog-dancing troupe, the Eight Lancashire Lads, but his education was over by the age of thirteen. Stories that he never went to school at all are not accurate.

He found his way onto the stage, joined Fred Karno’s comedy company in 1908 and toured North America with it. In 1914 he began making films for Keystone, and the Tramp character soon made him one of the most recognisable people on earth. In his autobiography he described how, conscious of his patchy schooling, he bought serious books, including Schopenhauer, and worked through them slowly for years. Chaplin went on to write, direct, score and star in classics such as The Kid, City Lights and Modern Times.

Heinrich Schliemann: the merchant who went looking for Troy

Schliemann, born in 1822 in Mecklenburg in northern Germany, was the son of a poor pastor. He spent a short time at a grammar school and then a vocational school, but poverty ruled out university. At about fourteen he became an apprentice in a grocery shop, where he later said his passion for Homer began.

In 1841 he signed on as a cabin boy on a ship bound for Venezuela; it was wrecked and he ended up in the Netherlands, working in Amsterdam as a messenger and bookkeeper. There he began teaching himself languages at astonishing speed and eventually spoke about a dozen. Sent to St Petersburg as a trading agent in 1846, he made a fortune, especially in indigo dye, and added more during a spell running a bank in California that bought gold dust during the gold rush.

Wealthy by his late thirties, he devoted himself to archaeology. In 1869 he married Sophia Engastromenos, a young Greek woman, and from 1870 he dug at Hisarlik in what is now Turkey, a site the British archaeologist Frank Calvert had already identified as a likely Troy. Schliemann found real ancient cities there, but his rough trenches destroyed much of the evidence, and the layer he took for Homer’s Troy proved far older. His romantic tale of vowing as a small child to find Troy comes from his own later writings, and historians treat it with caution, since he also admitted inventing other stories about his discoveries.

What these lives really teach about education

Other names are often added to such lists. Benjamin Franklin had about two years of formal schooling before working in his brother’s print shop. Andrew Carnegie started work as a bobbin boy in a cotton mill at thirteen. Alfred Nobel never went to university, though he was taught by private tutors in St Petersburg in chemistry and languages, so he was far from uneducated.

The lesson is not that school does not matter. Most of these men were obsessive readers and learned trades that demanded skill and discipline. Several had a parent or mentor who taught them early, and all lived at a time when leaving school young was normal. Their stories show that curiosity, practice and persistence can carry people a long way, and that learning does not stop at the classroom door.

Many of these sketches were first popularised by the German journalist Gerhard Prause in his book about famous people who struggled at school: Gerhard Prause's book: Genies in der schule.

Sources: Wikipedia: Thomas Edison; Wikipedia: Abraham Lincoln; Ford’s Theatre: Investigating the assassination; Wikipedia: Mark Twain; Wikipedia: Charles Dickens; Wikipedia: Charlie Chaplin; Wikipedia: Heinrich Schliemann; Nobel Prize: Alfred Nobel in St Petersburg. Many of these sketches were popularised by Gerhard Prause’s book Genies in der Schule.

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COMMENTS

BLOGGER: 2
  1. KafkasmuratFebruary 21, 2015 at 3:24 PM

    Hey, Schliemann was also a thief, who stole treasures from Turkey. This is clear with court cases, Ottomans opened for.

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  2. shokomanMarch 19, 2020 at 3:14 PM

    This comment has been removed by the author.

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