Who is the greatest self-taught genius in history?

Formal schooling is thin on this list. Several of them left it before their teens; one taught himself to read against the law.

1. 1
   Leonardo da Vinci

   Trained as a studio painter, learned anatomy, hydraulics and flight by looking and drawing.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Benjamin Franklin

   Left school at ten, apprenticed to a printer, and ended up a scientist and a diplomat.
   772pts
3. 3
   Michael Faraday

   A bookbinder's apprentice who read the volumes he was binding and became the century's great experimentalist.
   579pts
4. 4
   The Wright Brothers

   Bicycle mechanics with no engineering degrees who solved control before anyone solved lift.
   463pts
5. 5
   Frederick Douglass

   Taught himself to read while enslaved, then became the most formidable orator in America.
   463pts
6. 6
   Nikola Tesla

   Studied engineering at Graz and Prague without taking a degree, then built a grid from first principles.
   463pts
7. 7
   Henry Ford

   Left the family farm at sixteen and learned machining on the job.
   463pts
8. 8
   Antonie van Leeuwenhoek

   A Delft draper who ground lenses as a hobby and was first to see bacteria.
   392pts
9. 9
   Thomas Paine

   A corset maker's son who left school at twelve and wrote the pamphlet that argued for a revolution.
   392pts
10. 10
    Thomas Edison

    Had roughly three months of formal schooling and was taught the rest by his mother and by print shops.
    309pts
11. 11
    Abraham Lincoln

    About a year of schooling in total; taught himself law from borrowed books.
    309pts
12. 12
    Mary Anning

    A Lyme Regis fossil collector with no schooling whose finds rewrote early palaeontology.
    309pts
13. 13
    William Herschel

    A working musician who ground his own mirrors and discovered Uranus.
    210pts
14. 14
    Srinivasa Ramanujan

    Worked from a single borrowed textbook and produced results that took decades to prove.
    93pts
15. 15
    James Watt

    An instrument maker who improved the steam engine by understanding where its heat went.
    93pts