Of course, in 1900, it wasn’t the norm for absolutely everyone to finish high school, the way it is now, anyway. Nobody would expect a mechanic to have finished high school.
The flip side of this is Michael Faraday, probably the most important inventor of the 19th Century, who isn’t a really household name for a large part because he had no real academic education.
Is that a woosh? I watched it while growing up.
It’s not a whoosh. One presumes you grew up a long time ago, which is, despite the perceptual illusion of time passing while ageing, not recent.
Eh, most people have heard of a “Faraday cage”, I think, even if most don’t really understand how it works. That probably counts as a “household name”. The unit of capacitance is also named after him, though that’s a term that’s not as much used by the general public as, say, “volt” or “amp”.
And again, a made-for-tv movie is not either a Hollywood biopic or a limited series.
I’m a militant descriptionist but words still have some meaningful definitions and distinctions.
Chronos has a point that Faraday is at least reasonably well-known. Maybe not quite household, but the discourse only supports a handful of Einsteins. At any rate, Faraday is revered among scientists themselves. It’s fairly remarkable that he accomplished so much given that social standing was even more relevant then than today.
Who really isn’t a household name is Maxwell (he has his Equations named after him, but most laypeople never hear of them). I’ve often said that it’s tragic that the fourth-greatest physicist in history was upstaged by the third-greatest, a mere few decades later.
We could have had special relativity four decades early if Maxwell had really worked out the consequences of his equations. They directly imply SR.
I thought he was too busy exorcising demons to do more theoretical work.
I like to think I’m reasonably well-informed, but I’d never heard of a Faraday cage until it came up on some threads here. I don’t think I’d ever heard of Faraday himself, except maybe in some of Asimov’s science columns. (I did take Physics 101 and Chem 101 in my undergrad.)
Which he probably would have, if he’d lived past age 48.
That wasnt uncommon back then.
Well, demonology has always been dangerous. 
The Faraday is a unit of capacitance. Maybe you didn’t run across that in physics.
Fame comes from more prosaic reasons.
Feynman is very recognised, I suspect because of his highly readable and personal autobiographical books. Most people have no clue what he contributed other than something to do with “quantum”. I used to get really annoyed at computer scientists who insisted on calling state transition diagrams Feynman Diagrams as if this was displaying some sort of deep understanding, rather than being just plain wrong.
But nobody has heard of Dirac. Which is really sad.
People have heard of Galileo. Probably because of the of the leaning tower, and dropping stuff. Few appreciate his genius, and just how important he was to physics and science in general. Newton is known probably because the laws of motion are taught so early that everyone hears them. Calculus students are of course taught about him.
Archimedes because of running down the street yelling “Eureka”. Nobody remembers why he did this. And people are totally ignorant of his accomplishments.
Hawking would still be reasonably well known despite his debilitating illness. At the level of Penrose at least. (Although Penrose is likely much better known because of The Emperor’s New Mind.) Hawking was known in the UK as a science communicator in the media, and A Brief History of Time was written whilst he was still reasonably independent. I knew of him in the 70’s because as a teenager I was very interested in astronomy. Black hole radiation was a big deal. But his desperate disability became bigger than his contributions. Which is also sad.
The public fascination with the nature of the universe and quantum weirdness favours communicator scientists who contribute in these areas. How history will regard them is another matter entirely.
Stories rather than accomplishments get you remembered.
Faraday’s fame is complicated. There probably is a Britain/rest of the world aspect to it. In the relatively recent past, he could certainly be described as a household name in the UK. He was on the £20 banknote. But he also had a simple claim to fame as the founder of the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures. Even if few people ever watched them, those were an TV institution and everyone knew what they were. That connection was so strong that it almost entirely eclipsed Faraday’s other achievements. But the BBC lost interest and, as a result, during the past couple of decades the Lectures have mostly faded from popular consciousness. That has left Faraday much less easy to define in the British popular memory.
Faraday was the protégé of Humphrey Davy, who should also be a household name for his many discoveries, not least sodium.
Almost one of the early fluorine martyrs (and came up with the name), too. Luckily he only partially blinded himself.
Another thing to consider is naive modern audiences. They look at the Wright Flyer and compare it to a 737 or F-35 and think, “Of course a couple of high school dropouts who built bicycles could come up with that. It’s basically a bike with a big kite attached and a motor from an old car.” Because the appearance is simple compared to today’s planes, they discount the complexity and originality of the Wright Flyer. Plus in 1907, there weren’t a lot of old cars lying around to scavenge.
Youngsters who never saw a year with 19 as the lead in usually dismiss anything before an iPhone as ancient history equivalent to the Greeks and Romans. It takes a curious mind to delve into history as more than “all that stuff before I was born”.
I doubt that is as well known as you think.
True. Just like celebrity is not necessarily due to any accomplishment, but merely tied to the whims of pop culture.
I never ran across “the Faraday” in physics. It’s the “farad”.