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Albrecht Dürer
Born
Albrecht Dürer trained first as a goldsmith in his father's Nuremberg workshop, then from 1486 was apprenticed to the painter Michael Wolgemut, whose studio produced woodcuts for illustrated books such as the Nuremberg Chronicle. The goldsmith's precise handling of the burin and the workshop's printmaking know-how combined in his engravings and woodcuts, such as Melencolia I, which made prints a major art form across Europe.
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Michelangelo
Michelangelo was apprenticed at 13, in 1488, to the Florentine painter Domenico Ghirlandaio, whose workshop specialised in large frescoes, before moving to the Medici sculpture garden. He always called himself a sculptor and resisted painting the Sistine Chapel ceiling, but it was the fresco technique learnt in that apprenticeship that made the commission possible. The training he dismissed produced his most famous work.
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Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin was apprenticed at 12 to his older brother James, a Boston printer, and secretly wrote anonymous essays for his brother's newspaper before running away to Philadelphia in 1723. Printing gave him a trade, a business publishing the Pennsylvania Gazette and Poor Richard's Almanack, and a network of contacts. The income let him retire early and turn to science, diplomacy and politics.
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James Brindley
James Brindley, with little formal schooling, was apprenticed to a millwright near Macclesfield in 1733 and became known for repairing and improving mill machinery. The Duke of Bridgewater hired him to build the Bridgewater Canal, opened in 1761, which helped start Britain's canal age. Barely able to write, he reportedly worked out designs in his head, a mill-builder's practical intelligence applied to landscape engineering.
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Josiah Wedgwood
Josiah Wedgwood was apprenticed to his elder brother Thomas, a Staffordshire potter, in 1744, but childhood smallpox left him with a damaged knee that made working the potter's wheel difficult. Partly as a result he concentrated on glazes, clay bodies and process, running thousands of recorded experiments that produced jasperware. With partner Thomas Bentley he built one of the first modern industrial brands.
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Paul Revere
Born
Paul Revere learnt silversmithing as an apprentice in his father's Boston workshop and took it over at 19. His engraving skill produced the famous 1770 print of the Boston Massacre, based on Henry Pelham's design, a piece of revolutionary propaganda. After the war he used his metalworking knowledge to cast bells and cannon and to open one of the first copper-rolling mills in America.
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Thomas Telford
Born
Thomas Telford, a shepherd's son from Dumfriesshire, was apprenticed to a stonemason at 14 and worked as a mason in Edinburgh and London before becoming a surveyor and engineer. His understanding of stone shows in the Pontcysyllte Aqueduct and the Menai Suspension Bridge, as well as hundreds of miles of roads and canals. He became the first president of the Institution of Civil Engineers.
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Michael Faraday
Born
Michael Faraday, a blacksmith's son with little schooling, was apprenticed at 14 to the London bookbinder George Riebau, and read the science books he bound, including an encyclopaedia article on electricity. He attended Humphry Davy's lectures, bound his notes and sent them to Davy, who hired him as an assistant at the Royal Institution in 1813. His discoveries in electromagnetism followed, all without formal mathematics.
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Isambard Kingdom Brunel
Born
Isambard Kingdom Brunel was sent by his engineer father Marc to study in France, where he was apprenticed to the master clock and instrument maker Abraham-Louis Breguet. That training in precision mechanics preceded his work on the Thames Tunnel under his father and then the Great Western Railway, the Clifton Suspension Bridge design and the steamships Great Western and Great Eastern.
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Joseph Paxton
Born
Joseph Paxton, a farmer's son, trained as a gardener and was working at the Horticultural Society's garden in Chiswick when the Duke of Devonshire made him head gardener at Chatsworth at 23. Building glasshouses there, including one for the giant Amazon water lily whose ribbed leaves inspired his roof structure, led directly to his design for the Crystal Palace at the Great Exhibition of 1851.
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Henry Royce
Born
Henry Royce sold newspapers as a boy and, with an aunt's help, was apprenticed at the Great Northern Railway works in Peterborough, then worked in electrical engineering before founding his own company in Manchester in 1884. His obsessive mechanical standards impressed Charles Rolls, and their partnership from 1904 produced Rolls-Royce cars and, later, aero engines including the Merlin.
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Henry Ford
Born
Henry Ford left his family's Michigan farm at 16 to become an apprentice machinist in Detroit in 1879, later repairing steam engines and working as an engineer for the Edison Illuminating Company. That machine-shop grounding fed into the Model T of 1908 and the moving assembly line of 1913. His record also includes publishing antisemitic propaganda, which belongs in any honest account of him.
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Vidal Sassoon
Born
Vidal Sassoon grew up partly in a Jewish orphanage in London and was apprenticed at 14 to Adolph Cohen's salon in the East End, later working under the flamboyant stylist Raymond Bessone. He rejected backcombing and lacquer in favour of precise geometric cutting, culminating in the five-point bob of 1963. His academies went on to train generations of hairdressers in the same discipline.
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Yves Saint Laurent (designer)
Born
Yves Saint Laurent was hired as Christian Dior's assistant in 1955, at 19, learning the house's couture methods directly from the master. When Dior died suddenly in 1957, Saint Laurent became head designer at 21 and launched the acclaimed Trapeze line. Two years of that close apprenticeship gave him the technical foundation for his own house, founded with Pierre Bergé in 1961.
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Jean Paul Gaultier
Jean Paul Gaultier had no formal fashion training; he sent sketches to Pierre Cardin, who hired him as an assistant on his eighteenth birthday in 1970. He then worked for Jacques Esterel and Jean Patou before launching his own label in 1976. Learning couture on the job let him combine traditional technique with irreverent ideas, such as the corsets he designed for Madonna's 1990 tour.
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Alex Ferguson
Born
Alex Ferguson served an apprenticeship as a toolmaker at a Glasgow typewriter factory while playing part-time football, and became a shop steward who helped organise an apprentices' strike. He has often linked his managerial habits, discipline, punctuality and handling people, to those Govan working years. He went on to manage Aberdeen and then Manchester United for 26 years, winning 13 league titles with United.
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Marco Pierre White
Marco Pierre White left school at 16 and trained in hotel kitchens in Harrogate before working his way through London's best kitchens under Albert Roux at Le Gavroche, Pierre Koffmann and Raymond Blanc. That classical brigade training underpinned Harvey's and later his own restaurant, which in 1995 made him the youngest chef then to earn three Michelin stars. He in turn trained Gordon Ramsay and Heston Blumenthal.
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Alexander McQueen
Alexander McQueen left school at 16 and was apprenticed to the Savile Row tailors Anderson and Sheppard, then Gieves and Hawkes, before working for a theatrical costumier. The precise cutting he learnt there shaped the sharp tailoring of his collections, even at their most theatrical. After a master's at Central Saint Martins, his graduate collection was bought by stylist Isabella Blow, launching his label.
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