I’ve always been intrigued by people who have little or no formal education in a subject (sometimes none at all) but because of genius or tenacity or sometimes just a well timed observation invent or revolutionize a field. Examples:
Orville & Wilbur Wrights were the sons of a minister who owned a bike repair shop. Neither had a high school diploma let alone formal study in engineering or physics or aerodynamics, yet they are heralded as the bachelor fathers of American aviation. (True, there were many others working on an airplane prototype and the role of the Wright Bros. may be overrated in popular conception, but they were extremely important nonetheless.
Heinrich Schliemann, also a preacher’s son, he was obsessed with the classics from an early age but had to find a more lucrative profession than teaching due to his family’s circumstances. After making millions in the California Gold Rush (and, like most of the Gold Rush fortunes, not from mining) he famously financed and headed the archaeological dig that most classics scholars and archaeologists said was somewhere between futile and stupid and consequently led to the unearthing of Troy.
Philo Farnsworth, a Mormon farmboy, began calculating the ideas that would lead to the invention of television when he was a 14 year old looking at lines in a newly plowed field. He briefly attended BYU but was mostly autodidactic in his technical knowledge. His archenemy, David Farnsworth, was a peniless Russian immigrant who sold newspapers on the street, longed more than anything to be a Talmud scholar and became a Marconi operator almost by accident, but with little actual knowledge of electronics he created the largest media revolution of the 20th century first with radio and then with television.
The book The Professor and the Madman tells the story of how a long correspondence between a Civil War surgeon hospitalized in an asylum for the criminally insane (and also a preacher’s son, oddly enough) and a grade school teacher/bank clerk with little formal education led to the creation of The Oxford English Dictionary, considered the most scholarly standardly available lexicon of the English language.
Who are some others who would complement this list?
I think you mean David Sarnoff. And as for your list, the involvement of both Farnsworth and the Wrights was as pioneers in completely new fields. (Note that I’m not trying to denigrate their achievements, but it’s much harder for an amateur to do substantial work once the field matures.)
I think Albert Einstein might qualify; he did have a reasonable education but not a fantastic one, and he really wasn’t known by much of the scientific community until after 1905. He’s not quite so much an amatuer as you’re looking for, though.
Nikola Tesla is another example, I think; mostly self-taught, but made enormous discoveries and progress in physics.
I seem to recall astronomy being described as the only field left that an amatuer can make significant discoveries in- maybe some more astronomically-minded Dopers can flesh that out?
While certainly not uneducated, Augusto Odone’s doctorate in economics and his wife’s graduate studies in linguistics didn’t prepare them to understand anything about the super complicated enzymes and proteins, etc., that caused their son’s adrenoleukodystrophy (ALD). It was their research, however, rather than that of doctors and chemists, that resulted in the creation of Lorenzo’s Oil, which though not approved by the FDA is clinically proven to be the best treatment for the rare condition (and Lorenzo is still alive in his late 20s when it was generally agreed he’d die as a child).
A child prodigy, he was largely self-taught in mathematics and had compiled over 3,000 theorems by the age of 27 when he moved to Cambridge. Often, his formulas were merely stated, without proof, and were only later proven to be true. His results were highly original and unconventional, and have inspired a large amount of research and many mathematical papers, however some of his discoveries have been slow to enter the mathematical mainstream. Recently his formulae have started to be applied in the field of crystallography, and other applications in physics. The Ramanujan Journal was launched to publish work “in areas of mathematics influenced by Ramanujan”.
I’ve studied the Wright Brothers at some length and concluded that their role is not exaggerated - they were in fact far ahead of all others.
Indeed, it’s hard to support the notion that they were among a crowd of others working toward manned flight and just happened to stick their noses in front. Only a few others were seriously working on the problem prior to 1903, and none of these had any real success. When the Wrights finally began making public flights (several years after their first successes) it was still quite notable how far ahead they were.
Einstein wrote his papers after he had earned a doctorate in physics (he just couldn’t get a job teaching). Hardly an amateur, and he obviously had formal education in his subject, though his theories went way beyond that education.
How about Charles Goodyear? Basically, he ran a hardware store until he started experimenting with ways to make rubber and, after many attempted, stumbled upon the vulcanization process. His story is similar to the Wright Brothers, except he never managed to make any money from it (Goodyear Tire was named after him, but was founded long after he had died and not by any relative).
A lot of the professional astronomers are involved in “why and how?” projects, doing experiments and testing new theories. A lot of the “what?” work, like discovering and mapping new comets and asteroids, is mainly done by amatuers. Some of the well-known amatuer comet hunters include David Levy, Carolyn & Eugene Shoemaker, and Yuji Hyakutake.
Eugene Shoemaker had a PhD in geology, and worked most of his life in the field of planetary geology. Carolyn Shoemaker, though, did not have a degree and enteried the field as her husband’s assistant, and is now a respected astronomical observer in her own right.