6 Uneducated Amateurs Whose Genius Changed the World
Recently, an Internet entrepreneur made news by offering $100,000 to young people to not go to college. Now, we're not telling you not to get an education -- everybody knows employers these days want a degree. But we'd be remiss if we didn't take a moment to celebrate some of the amazing achievements from people who had virtually no education at all.
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The Amateur:
A guy who worked in a London book shop, with virtually no formal education.
The Accomplishment:
Revolutionized our understanding of electricity, and a whole lot more.
If you are using anything powered by electricity, if you know anything about magnetism, if you have ever used a Bunsen burner or if you are a big fan of benzene and the clathrate hydrate of chlorine (and who isn't?), then you owe some respect to Mr. Faraday. Michael Faraday was a genuine experimental genius and is considered one of the most influential scientists of all time. Oh, and he never had any formal education.
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"If a guy can electrify a frog and be called a genius, I think we're going to be fine."
Faraday was born into a poor family in industrial London, so he never had any money to pay for a proper school. Instead, at age 14 he took an apprenticeship at the local book-binder for seven years. While he was there, he started to read some of the books that he was binding -- sort of like working in a chocolate factory and eating all the chocolate, only you don't get fired for it.
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Unless you think this is the best way to absorb information.
Now, having read up on a bunch of science stuff and finding himself fascinated with it, he asked London's best scientist, Humphrey Davy, for an assistant job. Humphrey declined. To be honest, Faraday was a guy with absolutely no scientific experience or education who had just asked the best chemist in the business for a job.
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While nowadays, we line mattresses with newly graduated college students.
He did get a job in the next year though, and then shit went down. In short time, Faraday invented the electric motor, the electric generator, the Bunsen burner, electrolysis and electroplating. He discovered electro-magnetic induction, he discovered benzene, he figured out the shape of magnetic fields, discovered metallic nano-particles (thought to be the birth of nano-science) and something complicated about chlorine. Basically, he was a science machine.
Today, his legacy lives on as one of the best scientists the world has ever seen, despite having never been taught science in his life. Besides, no one could really teach him much science because he discovered most of it. Davy, the world famous chemist who turned down his initial job application, was once asked, "What was your greatest discovery?" He replied, "Michael Faraday."
The Amateur:
A composer who played the cello and oboe, who had no education in astronomy.
The Accomplishment:
Discovered several moons and, oh yeah -- a new planet.
German native William Herschel dreamed about outer space, but in his day-to-day life found himself about as far away from the stars as one can get; namely, England in the 18th century. He was a talented musician and by his late 20s, was taking prominent jobs in the exciting world of professional organ playing, and all the professional organ player groupies that presumably came with a gig like that.
Oh, and Herschel also happened to be a certified genius. Though being seriously interested in all things extra-terrestrial, he didn't have a telescope. Obviously, the most sensible solution was to spend 16 hours a day grinding up mirrors and lenses to make his own. To fill out the underdog shape of this story arc, we like to think this happened after the rich, popular scientists made fun of him for not having a telescope at a dance.
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"I'll show them, with the skills I learned grinding organs!" - Grinding To Uranus: The William Herschel Story
According to his journal, he "began to look at the planets and stars" in May 1773, as opposed to, you know, using the telescope to spy on nude sunbathing neighbors (they used to do that in 1773, right?). A few years later, after some casual, mind-numbingly intense searching of the sky, he found something interesting.
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No, not her.
As he searched the sky, he found something that didn't quite fit as a star or a comet. After sending off his observations to a Russian professional he realized he'd discovered a freaking planet. Uranus, to be exact.
observadores-cometas.com
Probably shown here.
Obviously he was rather pleased. Herschel decided to name the planet the "Georgian Star" after King George III, because although being only an amateur astronomer, he was a professional suck up. The name didn't catch on, but somehow "Uranus" did -- so he went with that. Honestly, the people naming the first planet discovered since the ancients should have been able to hire a better PR team. Still, Herschel discovered a planet, which is quite a bit more than we've accomplished to date, even if you count going this entire entry and only making one your-anus jokes.
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"What ever did that gentlemen mean? My anus. How preposter ...
OH GODDAMMIT PEOPLE ARE GOING TO BE DOING THAT FOR CENTURIES."
The Amateur:
An impoverished Indian teenager.
The Accomplishment:
Lived Good Will Hunting in real life.
If you paid really close attention in Good Will Hunting, you might recall that at one point, Robin Williams has a conversation in which Matt Damon's genius janitor is compared to someone named Srinivasa Ramanujan. It was right after a "dots not feathers" racist joke. We knew that would jog your memory. Well, that was a real guy. He taught himself math, and turned out to be one of the greatest math geniuses to come along in the last few centuries.
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Seen here, mocking you endlessly while you try to figure out the postage from India.
Ramanujan was insanely good at math, and it wasn't due to any education, either -- he was entirely self taught. His parents gave him a math textbook on advanced trigonometry around age 11. He decided to learn the hell out of that book, and then because advanced trigonometry was so piss easy, he derived his own sophisticated theorems all by himself.
At age 13.
He did go to college later, but failed out of school because it was hard to focus on classes about art history and fungus biology when he was inventing new math in his spare time.
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"This isn't even a goddamn triangle."
Still living in abject poverty, he started sending his theorems off to various important math people -- some in India, some in England. Almost every time his work was dismissed as a hoax, or returned without comment, presumably unread. Other times the mathematicians on the receiving end had no idea what they were looking at, because these were equations no human had ever created.
Finally, when a professor at Cambridge University saw the theorems, he recognized the work of a genius and invited Ramanujan to England. Ramanujan refused to leave India "to go to a foreign land," despite Professor Hardy offering possibly his only chance at recognition. At this point, we'd probably make a joke that he had the biggest balls in mathematics, but he actually had a medically swollen testicle that had to be drained annually, so that seems a bit insensitive.
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Unlike his testicle.
Today, his formulas have found uses in everything from string theory to crystallography. Hardy said that his mathematical genius was comparable to guys like goddamned Isaac Newton and Archimedes. Yeah, that's going back more than 2,000 years to find somebody in his class. If he hadn't died at the young age of 32, he probably would have been the sort of household name you don't need racist and ball jokes to remember.
I took my Chemistry lessons in my school's awesomely named "Faraday Lab". C:
ReplyLove cracked articles.. and reading continously since i have discovered this site.. Thanks cracked team
Replyfunny how genetics was discovered by a holly man
ReplyI think he was more of a sweet pea guy.
Absorbing knowledge by eating books ... that's just silly ... everyone knows you have to sleep with the book under your pillow to learn anything!
ReplyArguably these were all autodidacts, with the unusual ability to focus and to teach one's self. Classical education can stifle this sort of genius. A lot of people think they qualify as autodidacts yet are merely dilettantes . They and the rest of us should stay in school.
ReplyUneducated monk? Are you retarded? All they did was learn. The only schooling systems from the middle ages were provided by monks.
ReplyThe 19th Century was not the middle ages.
Donald Harden would no doubt have been even more heroic if he was named Richard.
ReplyRichard Harden... hmmm... i don't see, it stop being a "Dick" there is nothing wrong with the name Donald
Every Cracked article that features 'dinosaurs' is riddled with inaccuracies that could easily be avoided if the authors did the slightest bit of research. Icthyosaurs and pterosaurs are NOT dinosaurs! You can't even imagine how bothersome this error is to paleontologists- news articles are ALWAYS making the same mistake. Dinosaurs were terrestrial! They didn't live in the ocean and they didn't fly (non-avian dinosaurs, anyway)! When you think of dinosaurs you shouldn't see pterosaurs, Dimetrodon or anything with fins, but unfortunately since this simple error is so perpetuated by the media it's hard to expel it from our minds.
ReplyEverything that lived million years ago is a dinosaur, period. Even if its a tree. Now go away!
All these people were educated.
Replyyep. not schooled. but educated.
I have to agree. Although there is a difference between "formal education" and "learning", there are many people who have received a "formal education" that are complete and total idiots. Most of those that learn from experience become "experts" (note the same root word).
Uranus is derived from the Greek "Ouranos", meaning sky. Nothing to do with taking the piss out of the young musician
Reply...You mean the s**t?
Like six of the other seven planets, Uranus was also named for was one of the Gods, father of the Titans and grandfather of the Olympians, including Zeus.
Mary Anning did not find dinosaurs. She discovered seamonsters from the middle Jurassic. Also the picture of her is overcropped:
ReplyThe picture bisects her dog Tray. Her work was very dangerous. A landslide killed Tray. Seconds before the landslide, Mary Anning stood where Tray stood.
I would rather make super-monsters with the body of a chimpanzee and the head of a crocodile. They could climb trees and throw feces at people with their simian hands and at the same time bite off your leg with their powerful reptile jaws.
ReplyAre you an aspiring supervillain, Oliver?? Hmmmm.... even the name sounds good - Oliver Fields.
I'd like to think that the name "Uranus" was related to King George's rear end in some way.
ReplySorry but I have to point out that William Herschel was not the first to discover Uranus. I'm not sure if anyone here has read anything Zecharia Sitchin wrote about the Sumerians but this ancient civilization knew every planet in our solar system. And that was at 5000 freakin BC. Of course they didn't name it Uranus(I'm guessing because even back then they saw how many bad jokes could be spawned) but they described its damn COLOR and it wasn't until 1986 that scientists confirmed it.
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesYeah, they had space ships back then only the ships were made out of wood & stone :P
They named it Nahumato. It was their deity of agriculture and choking on dicks when reading Cracked articles.
Zecharia Sitchin is/was a fraud. Be gone.
The technical definition of "Genious" is someone who's thought of someone who's never thought of before, which meas ironically, this makes it LESS likely that the highly educated might be geniouses. Not impossible of course but you don't win NobelPrizes by quoting someone else from 1,000 years ago. If you prove them WRONG on the other hand...
ReplyAm I seriously the only one that noticed that deccha1981, the genius, doesn't know how to spell G-E-N-I-U-S?
Is it just me, or does Ramanujan look like M.Night Shyamalan in the his stamp portrait??
Reply Hide All See All 3 RepliesNo, you're just racist..
I don't think he resembles Shyamalan, but okay: at the risk of sounding racist, I do think Ramanujan looks a little bit like Kal Penn in the stamp portrait (just in that image, not the photo). Picture 'Kumar' with an old-school pompadour and uh, a bit of a smoldering stare. And in that old-timey sepia tone. He wouldn't be a dead ringer or anything, but I think there would be a resemblance.
It's the mouth. And the mathiness.
this article makes me proud to be human
ReplyWikipedia says that Gregor Mendel went to university...
ReplyBecause Wikipedia = Absolute Truth Forever.
Obviously Cracked does as well, this is the clash of the never-wrong information titans.
You don't need a university to educate yourself if you are motivated. Formal education is for the granting of credentials, and for the rest of us slackers who would be in our parents' basement at 40 if we weren't given deadlines.
ReplyThat teacher ... he doesn't change the world ... he was there because you need to put an American on the list, don't you. Soooo ... again ... what about Thomas Edison ...
Reply Hide All See All 4 Replies(booooo!!!)
(hissss!!!)
You should spend some time learning just what Edison did, which was steal the work of others and claim it as his own.
And he was the best at it without needing any fancy stealin' education.
@ bobbquackenbush
I suspect he's aware of it, as Cracked is known to be an arch-enemy of Thomas Edison. See "5 Famous Inventors (Who Stole Their Big Idea)" or just do a search for 'Edison.' Methinks f**kingpedant is simply trying to rouse the rabble, as it were. Heh.
Yeah! 9/11! Obamacare! Watergate gate! Uhh... Bush administration! Nuclear reactors! Global warming! That thing with the water poisoning or something! :)