One of the most famously self-educated men in history, Frederick Douglass was born a slave in Maryland in 1818. He learned to read as a child while living in Baltimore, Md., after which he constantly sought to educate himself further through reading. When he was 20 years old, he escaped slavery to settle in Massachusetts, where he continued his self-directed studies and eventually became one of America's most important writers and abolitionists. On the next page, you'll see a self-educated architect.
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Tadao Ando is a respected and prize-winning architect from Japan, but before he entered the field of architecture, he dealt blows as both a boxer and a carpenter. Rather than enrolling in formal training as an architect, Ando devoured books on architecture and visited exceptional buildings to see the principles of architecture at work. Click ahead to see a brilliant researcher who never received a bachelor's degree.
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Jane Goodall is considered one of the world's foremost primatologists and ethologists. Therefore, it might come as a surprise to know that Goodall had no formal education in the study of primates when she did her groundbreaking work in the Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania.
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Goodall did eventually receive a Ph.D. for her research among the chimpanzees, but much of her most important field work was done when she had no college education whatsoever -- not even a bachelor's degree. Today, her contribution to our understanding of chimpanzee behavior is considered profoundly important. In the years since her primary research, Goodall has focused on environmental conservation efforts and animal protection.
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The British scientist Michael Faraday (1791-1867) was born to a poor family, and he could not afford to attend a university. While working as an apprentice bookbinder during his teens, Faraday began to read scientific tomes. This curious teenager grew up to discover the electromagnetic principles that allow us to build electric motors. Next, we'll see a self-educated inventor from the other side of the Atlantic.
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Despite his lack of a formal education outside the home, American inventor Thomas Edison (1847-1931) is now remembered as one of the most important innovators in the history of American engineering. He is best known for his invention of the light bulb, but he also developed the phonograph, the motion picture camera and more than a thousand other patented devices. Sometimes known as "The Wizard of Menlo Park," Edison was one of the first to use mass production to develop his creations.
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In the photo above, taken in 2003, aviation enthusiasts in Kill Devil Hills, N.C., operate a replica flyer to celebrate the centennial of Orville and Wilbur Wright's first successfully controlled, sustained fixed-wing flight. Neither of the Wright brothers attended college, nor did they receive formal training as engineers. Next, you'll read about a self-taught mathematician.
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This Hindu temple rests in Kumbakonam, Tamil Nadu, India, the home town of Srinivasa Iyengar Ramanuja (1887-1920), one of the most brilliant mathematicians the world has known. Ramanuja was completely self-taught, but after mailing some of his proofs to a British mathematician in 1913, he was invited to a residency at Trinity College, Cambridge. He suffered from poor health in England and returned to India several years later, where he died in Kumbakonam in 1920.
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Florence Nightingale (1820-1910) introduced many desperately needed reforms to nursing, hygiene and hospital care. Much of what Nightingale learned about medical science and treatment she had to teach herself, since nurses received minimal education at the time. In the picture above, Chinese nurses light candles in honor of Nightingale. Next, we'll see a self-educated American author.
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The celebrated American author and humorist Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, was not born into a wealthy family. Throughout his young life, Clemens worked a number of jobs, including stints as a typesetter, a steamboat pilot and a silver miner. During this time, he educated himself among the shelves of public libraries. Click ahead to see another self-educated American author.
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Above, the American author Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961) maintains his public image. After his service in World War I, Hemingway went on to become one of the most beloved literary masters of the 20th century, despite the fact that he never received a college education. Click ahead to see a college dropout who became a billionaire.
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Steve Jobs (1955-2011), who co-founded Apple Inc. in 1976 and served as the company's CEO from the late '90s until the year of his death, was one of the wealthiest people in America. Jobs had a reputation as a gifted innovator and technologist, despite the fact that he dropped out of Reed College after only one semester. Jobs educated himself through hands-on work with electronics, computer club meetings and a few psychedelic experiments. Read about one of his past cohorts on the next page.
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Bill Gates (1955-), who is one of the most well-known personal computer entrepreneurs in the world, co-founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1976. Still a non-executive chairman with the company, he now spends much of his time on philanthropic pursuits through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. After only two years at Harvard, Gates dropped out and pursued his own interests. Next, you'll read about a self-educated U.S. president.
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Two members of the District of Columbia Fire Department investigate a 2006 anthrax scare at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. Abraham Lincoln, usually considered one of the greatest American presidents of all time, received almost no formal schooling, educating himself through extensive private reading. Next, you'll see a self-educated genius who shared Lincoln's birthday.
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Though the English naturalist Charles Darwin received a sufficient standard education, he was self-taught in the relevant sciences, learning on his own how to approach the natural world with an eye for patterns and correlation. His self-accrued vision may have been what allowed him to articulate natural relationships that were unclear to his contemporaries.
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English novelist Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880) was known to the world by her pseudonym, George Eliot. Evans reportedly chose a male pen name so that her work would be treated with seriousness in the patriarchal literary community of Victorian England. Though she lacked the extent of formal schooling that many male authors of her time would have enjoyed, Eliot cultivated an exceptional literary intellect through private reading and study at home.
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Above, Jimi Hendrix (1942-1970) performs at the Felt Forum on Jan. 28, 1970, in New York City. Hendrix is widely considered one of the greatest guitar players in the history of rock music. He introduced a truly innovative soloing style and demonstrated an unrivaled fluidity in his relationship to his chosen instrument -- at which he was almost entirely self-taught.
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Perhaps because it is traditionally a folk instrument, the guitar has many well-known and greatly respected autodidacts. Django Reinhardt (1910-1953) is known as genius of the jazz guitar. Not only was Reinhardt mostly self-taught, he was forced to come up with a new left-hand playing style after his fingers were badly burned in an accident.
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The American director Steven Spielberg does a publicity shot for his 1993 film Jurassic Park. With groundbreaking, critically-acclaimed hits such as Jaws (1975), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and Schindler's List (1993), Spielberg became the highest-grossing director in the history of film. Before he ever studied the art of filmmaking at California State University Long Beach or on the lots of Universal Studios as an intern, a young Spielberg was teaching himself how to make movies on 8mm in his hometown of Scottsdale, Ariz.
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Malcolm Little (1925-1965), born in Omaha, Neb., would one day become Malcolm X, a Black Muslim minister and civil rights activist. In 1946, Malcolm X was convicted of burglary and imprisoned for seven years. While incarcerated, he embarked on a furious campaign of self-education, copying the entire dictionary by hand and sometimes staying up to read for hours after the prison lights had been extinguished.
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Octave Chanute was a French-American engineer who took a great interest in the burgeoning field of aviation design toward the end of the 1800s, designing stacked gliders like this one. Chanute, who was self-taught in the field of engineering, was also a friend and advisor of the Wright Brothers. Next you'll see an illustration of a famous experiment.
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Benjamin Franklin did many things and did almost all of them very well: He was known for excellence as a scientist, inventor, businessman, author, humorist and political leader. By almost every metric and in almost every subject, Franklin was self-made, self-taught and self-motivated. Next, you'll see a self-educated Portuguese author.
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While working as an auto mechanic and a civil servant in Portugal's Social Welfare Service, the Portuguese writer Jose Saramago (1922-2010) educated himself in literature at a public library in Lisbon, with "no help or guidance except curiosity and the will to learn." Saramago won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998.
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Abigail Adams (1744-1818) was a farm operator, home manufacturer, social advocate, woman of letters, and the wife of President John Adams. She was also an autodidact, undergoing only a minimal formal education in her youth, but always reading and writing extensively. The letters between John and Abigail reveal a strong intellectual friendship based on mutual respect and frequent debate.
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Charles Dickens (1812-1870) received an elementary school education, but he was forced to abandon his schooling and go to work when his father was incarcerated in a debtors' prison in 1824. Despite the fact that he was unable to continue his formal education, Dickens' childhood experiences went on to inform his novels, many of which chronicled the lives of the poor in Victorian England.
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