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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
Little Known Facts About Well Known People by Dale Carnegie is not written as a conventional historical or biographical work, but as a collection of striking, provocative stories designed to shock, amuse, and inspire. Each chapter is built around a bold claim drawn from the book's table of contents, presenting famous figures through paradox, irony, and surprise rather than documented chronology. The result is a series of vivid narrative sketches that challenge the reader's assumptions about greatness. Albert Einstein is introduced as a former school dunce, someone whose early failures stand in stark contrast to his later reputation as a "wizard" of science. Edgar Allan Poe appears as a poet who married a child and earned almost nothing for a decade of work, while Cleopatra is framed through her power to win the love of two of the greatest leaders of her age. Carnegie delights in unlikely transformations. Greta Garbo is remembered as once working in a barber's shop before becoming an icon, and Guglielmo Marconi as an inventor so disruptive that people supposedly tried to shoot him for creating wireless communication. Rudolf is evoked through haunting imagery of tragedy rather than royal grandeur. Power and success are repeatedly stripped of glamour. Catherine the Great rules an empire yet lives a scandalous private life; Napoleon Bonaparte keeps a bride waiting at the altar; Charlie Chaplin changes world history without personal thrill; and Walt Disney builds a fortune from a mouse and three pigs. Through these exaggerated, memorable contrasts, Carnegie suggests a single idea: greatness is rarely neat, dignified, or predictable. It is often born from embarrassment, contradiction, and astonishing reversals—making fame far more human than legendary.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Little Known Facts About Well Known People
Table of Contents
The Wizard Einstein Was Once the School Dunce
I was walking down the streets of a little town in Southern Germany a few years ago when a friend who was with me suddenly stopped and pointed to a window over a grocery shop and said: “See that little apartment up there? That is where Einstein was born.”
Later that day, I met Einstein’s uncle and talked to him. But he didn’t impress me as being a man of any unusual ability. But that isn’t strange, for when Albert Einstein himself was a child, no one thought he would amount to much either. He is now regarded as the outstanding intellectual giant of this generation, one of the most profound thinkers of all time; yet fifty years ago, he was a slow, shy, backward child. He found it extremely difficult to learn even to talk. He was so dull that his own teachers called him a bore, and even his parents feared that he was subnormal.
Einstein was astonished to wake up a few years ago and find himself one of the most famous men on all the earth. It seemed absolutely incredible that a professor of mathematics had become front page news on five continents. He, a scientist, has become as famous as Jack Dempsey. He admits he can’t understand it. No one can understand it. Such a thing has never happened before in all the annals of mankind.
This man Einstein is almost as strange as his Theory of Relativity. He has nothing but contempt for the things most people set their hearts on—for fame and riches and luxury. For example, the captain of a transatlantic ship once offered Einstein the most expensive suite of rooms on the vessel; but Einstein declined and said he would rather travel in the steerage than accept any special favours.
When Einstein reached his fiftieth birthday, Germany overwhelmed him with honours, erected a bust of him at Potsdam, and offered him a home and a sail boat as a token of the nation’s love and undying admiration.
But a few years later his property was taken away from him and he was afraid to return to his native land. For weeks he lived in Belgium behind barred doors and a policeman slept at his bedside every night.
When he arrived in New York to become Professor of Mathematics in the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, he was anxious to avoid reporters and interviews and excitement; so his friends took him off the ship secretly before it docked and hurried him away by motorcar.
Einstein says that there are only twelve people living who understand his Theory of Relativity, although more than nine hundred books have been written attempting to explain it.
He himself explains Relativity by this very simple illustration: When you sit with a nice girl for an hour, you think it is only a minute; but when you sit on a hot stove for a minute, you think it is an hour.
Well, well—so that’s relativity. It sounds all right to me; but if you doubt it and would like to try it out, I’ll be glad to sit with the girl if you’ll sit on the stove.
And speaking of girls, Einstein has been married twice. He has two boys by his first marriage, both brilliant chaps with the earmarks of genius.
Mrs. Einstein admits that even she doesn’t understand the Theory of Relativity; but she understands something that is far more important for a wife; she understands her husband.
She used to invite her friends in for tea occasionally and then she would ask the Professor to come downstairs and join them. “No!” he would exclaim violently. “No! I won't! I won't! I’m going away from here. I can’t work here. I simply won’t stand these interruptions any longer.”
Frau Einstein would keep perfectly quiet until he had blown of steam for awhile; and then, presently, by using a little diplomacy, she would have him downstairs drinking tea and getting some much-needed relaxation.
Frau Einstein says that her husband likes order in his thinking, but he doesn’t like it in his living. He does whatever he wants to, whenever he wants to. And he has only two rules of conduct. The first one is: Don’t have any rules whatever. And the second one is: Be independent of the opinions of others.
He leads a very simple sort of an existence, goes around in old clothes that need pressing, seldom wears a hat, and whistles and sings in the bathroom. He shaves while sitting in the bath tub and he doesn’t use shaving soap. He shaves with the same soap that he uses for his bath. This man who is trying to solve the vexing riddles of the universe says that using two kinds of soap makes life entirely too complicated. Einstein impresses me as being a very happy man. His philosophy of happiness means far more to me than does his Theory of Relativity. I think it a splendid philosophy. He says he is happy because he doesn’t want anything from anybody. He doesn’t want money or titles or praise. He makes his own happiness out of such simple things as his work and playing the violin and sailing his boat.
Einstein’s violin brings him more joy than anything else in life. He says he often thinks in music and lives his daydreams in music.
Once, while riding on a tram-car in Berlin, he told the conductor that he hadn’t given him the right change. The conductor counted the change again and found it to be correct, so he handed it back to Einstein saying: “The trouble with you is, you don’t know figures.”
The Man Who Was Robbed of £200,000,000
Out in California, on January 24th, 1848, John W. Marshall, a carpenter, was building a grist mill on the South fork of the American River; and on this particular day, he stooped and picked up a small yellow stone that had been washed down from the wooded hills above the present city of Sacramento. Was it gold? He couldn’t tell. So he gave it to a workman’s wife, who was boiling some homemade soap. She tossed the stone into the kettle of boiling fat and lye.
After being cooked all day, the nugget gleamed like a tiger’s eye; and the next morning at daybreak, John W. Marshall leaped on his horse and hurried pell-mell forty miles down the canyon to the ranch house of his employer, John A. Sutter.
Marshall rushed into the house, locked the door and pulled the yellow nugget from his pocket. Sutter stared at it, wide-eyed with excitement.
It was gold and he knew it. A pure nugget of glistening gold. His wildest dreams had been transcended. He would soon be lord of all creation, the richest man in the world.
Sutter attempted to keep the discovery a secret; but he might as well have tried to prevent the very stars from shining in their orbits. He had unleashed a force that was destined to shake the continent. Within a day, all the men on Sutter’s ranch left their appointed tasks and, in a mad frenzy of greed, they were scratching and digging and panning for gold.
In a week, the whole countryside was in a turmoil. Ranches were deserted. Everything was in chaos. Cows were left bellowing to be milked. Calves bawled in vain for their mothers, while wolves slaughtered the bleating sheep.
Excited men, with pick and shovels, were soon making from £200 to £1,000 between sunrise and sunset. One cut of the spade and a couple of shakes of the sieve and presto! nuggets worth thousands lay at your feet—a fortune made in a minute.
Telegraph wires flashed the sensational news across the continent and convulsed the United States with excitement. Workmen left their shops, soldiers deserted from the army by wholesale, farmers abandoned their lands, merchants locked their shops. The gold diggers were on the move. The locust swarm of humanity took wings and headed for the golden land beyond the sunset.
In the spring of 1849, a mighty cavalcade trekked out of Independence, Kansas, the last outpost of civilization. Youth was in the saddle, youth thrilling to the quest of a new adventure. From the Missouri River to the snow-packed summits of the Sierra Nevadas, there flowed a long, unbroken line of wagon trains, drawn by horses and slow-moving oxen. The prairie was riotously green with spring and rollicking songs rolled from wagon train to wagon train.
Countless thousands of others were coming by sea. Packed into whaling ships and cargo boats, they rounded Cape Horn under whining sails and creaking masts. Smashed and pounded by hurricanes off the Straits of Magellan, racked by raging fevers, smitten with scurvy, their ranks decimated by cholera, the gold diggers sailed on, as irresistible as the sweep of the mighty Pacific.
In the hectic year 1849, more than seven hundred vessels dropped anchor in San Francisco Bay, and the sailors immediately deserted their ships and rushed to the hills.
It was a mob, a rabble, that recognized no law but the law of the knife and the club, and obeyed no orders unless they were backed up by guns.
Naturally, the mob converged from all sides on Sutter’s ranch. They trampled his grain underfoot and they stole his wheat to make bread. They demolished his barns to build shanties and they slaughtered his cattle to get steaks.
What was even more astonishing, these treasure hunters even had the audacity to build towns on the private property of John A. Sutter; and the old rancher looked on in helpless rage while strange men bought and sold and resold his land as if he had never existed.
In 1850, California was ushered into the Union, and the majestic order of law now ruled over the turbulent hills.
Then Sutter started the biggest law suit in history. He declared that San Francisco and Sacramento were both built on his private property and he prosecuted every “squatter” living in those towns and ordered them to get off his land at once. He sued the States of California for £5,000,000 as compensation, for the private roads and bridges and canals that he had built and the State had appropriated for public use.
He demanded that the United States Government pay him £10,000,000 for the damages he had suffered; and he also demanded that he be paid a royalty for every penny’s worth of gold dust that had been carried away from his property.
For four years he fought the case through court after court, and in 1855, he won. The highest court in the State of California declared that the cities of San Francisco and Sacramento and scores of other towns and villages, were built on his private property.
The news of this sensational decision rocked the inhabitants of San Francisco and Sacramento like an earthquake. So the law was going to put them out of their homes, was it? Well, they would show the law a thing or two! A milling mob, driven mad by desperation, grabbed guns and axes and torches and marched through the streets, yelling and sacking and looting and burning.
They set fire to the law courts, and burned up the records; then they got a rope and tried to lynch the judge who had rendered the decision. Leaping on their horses, they dashed away to Sutter’s ranch, put sticks of dynamite under his houses and barns and blew his buildings high into the sky. They burned his furniture. They cut down his fruit trees. They shot his cattle. They turned his fertile ranch into a place of smoking desolation.
They murdered one of Sutter’s sons. They drove another one to commit suicide; and the third son was drowned while attempting to get to Europe. John A. Sutter himself, staggering under these cruel blows, lost his reason.
For twenty years after that, he haunted the Capitol at Washington, trying to persuade Congress to recognize his rights. Dressed in rags, the poor, demented old man, went from one Senator to another, pleading for justice; and the children in the street laughed and jeered at him as he passed.
In the spring of 1880, he died alone in a furnished room in Washington. Died, neglected and despised by those who had filched millions from his land. He didn’t have a penny when he passed away, but he did have a legal deed to the greatest fortune on earth.
Five years later, John W. Marshall passed on—Marshall, the carpenter, whose discovery had started the most gigantic gold rush in the history of the Western World. He died alone in his squalid cabin. Other men had made many million pounds out of his discovery, but he didn’t leave enough money to pay for a cheap coffin.
The Poet Who Married a Child and Got £2 For Ten Years’ Work
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most striking and romantic geniuses that ever wrote a sonnet or concocted a mystery. He was destined to stride like a melancholy giant across the pages of American literature. Yet he was removed from the University of Virginia because of his wild passion for gambling and drinking; and later on, he was court-martialled and kicked out of West Point Military Academy because he ignored all rules and sat in his quarters writing poetry when he ought to have been out on the parade ground drilling with a gun.
Poe was left an orphan early in life, and adopted by a rich tobacco merchant. Finally, even this merchant turned against his adopted son, beat him with a cane, drove him out of the house, disinherited him, and refused to leave him a penny in his will.
The story of Poe’s marriage is one of the most beautiful tales in literature. He married his first cousin, Virginia Clem. He had no money at the time. He never had had any money and he never would have any money. He drank raw alcohol. His only sister had gone crazy, and some people accused him of being half mad. And he was twice as old as his young wife. He was twenty-six and she was thirteen. According to all the old copy-book adages, his marriage should have ended in swift and sure disaster. But it didn’t: it was a romantic success. Poe all but worshipped this child-wife of his, and his undying love for her inspired some of the most exquisite poetry that ever enriched the English language.
Edgar Allan Poe spun stories and created verses that were destined to be placed among the literary glories and treasures of the earth; and yet he couldn’t sell these immortal masterpieces for enough to buy bread. For example, he gave the world a poem that has become immortal:
And the raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas, just above my chamber door. And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon that is dreaming, And the lamplight o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor.
Poe wrote and rewrote and revised The Raven, and worked on it intermittently for ten years; and yet he had to sell it for only £2.
John Barrymore, out in Hollywood, got more than that for one minute of his services. Apparently, there is more money in pictures than in poetry.
Poe, as I said, got £2 for writing The Raven; and the original manuscript recently sold for tens of thousands. Why is it that we let our geniuses go hungry while they are living, and then pay fantastic prices for their handwriting when they are dead?
Up at the Grand Concourse, in New York, is the cottage where Poe and Virginia lived. When Poe rented the place eighty-eight years ago, it was just an old shack about to fall to pieces. Now it is surrounded by apartment houses; but then it was in the country, nestling among the apple-trees; and when spring crept up from the South, the air was redolent with the perfume of lilac and cherry blossom, and the air hummed with the buzzing of bees. It was a beautiful, dream-like spot.
Poe rented the place for 12/- a month; but he couldn’t pay even that. Most of the time he didn’t pay any rent at all. His wife was ill with consumption; and he couldn’t even buy food for her. Sometimes they went for days and days without anything to eat at all. When the dandelions began to bloom in the yard, they picked them and boiled them and ate dandelions, day after day.
When the neighbours discovered that Poe and his wife were on the verge of actual starvation, they brought them baskets of food. Pitiful? Yes, but he had the gift of song, and she had the gift of loving—and so they were happy, in spite of their poverty.
Virginia died there, eighty-seven years ago; and for months before she died, she lay on a straw mattress without enough clothing to keep her warm. When she became too cold, her mother rubbed her hands and Poe rubbed her feet. Poe covered her shivering body with his old military cloak that he had worn at West Point, and at night, he coaxed the cat to sleep at her feet.
When she died, Poe didn’t have enough money to bury her; and if it hadn’t been for the kindness of a neighbour, she would have been sent to Potter’s field.
Years ago, the States of New York purchased this cottage, and made it a shrine. To me, it is a dream-cottage, filled with haunting and melancholy memories, and I can hardly tear myself away from it.
Virginia died in January. Months passed, spring came, the moon rose over the apple-trees and the stars twinkled on the western horizon, but Poe sat and dreamed and longed for Virginia; and out of that longing, he wrote the most beautiful love tribute that any man ever paid to his wife:
For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabel Lee, And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes, of the beautiful Annabel Lee. And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea, In her tomb by the sounding sea.
Cleopatra Won the Love of Two of the Greatest Leaders Who Ever Lived
This is a bit of the story of the most seductive sweetheart who ever raised a man’s blood pressure. Her name was Cleopatra, the queen goddess of Egypt—Cleopatra, the enchantress of the Nile.
She has been dead for two thousand years, but her fame still g'ows brightly across the centuries. She committed suicide when she was thirty-nine; yet in her short riot of life, she won and held the ardent love of two of the most famous men who ever walked the earth—Mark Antony and Julius Caesar, the latter of whom you honour every time you speak of the month of July, which was named in his memory.
Caesar had conquered practically all the earth; but little Cleopatra conquered him, and the story of how she did it is one of the dramatic incidents of antiquity.
When Caesar drifted down to Alexandria, forty-eight years before the birth of Christ, Cleopatra was in a bad Way. Her throne had been taken away from her, she had no money and she was in grave danger of having her head cut off. She had married her brother, they had had a family quarrel, he made war on her, and she had fled from Cairo to save her life.
Caesar commanded her to appear before him. But how could she? That was a problem, for Alexandria was infested with her brother’s spies, and to be caught meant instant death. So one dark night, she slipped into the city in a small fishing boat, had her servant tie her up in a roll of carpet being shipped to the palace, and unroll it before the eyes of the mighty Caesar.
When Cleopatra leaped out of that carpet and started laughing and dancing around the room, the very sight of her exquisite body quickened the blood of the astonished Caesar.
Boasting that he himself was descended from Venus, the goddess of Love, Caesar prided himself on being a judge of feminine pulchritude; but this was something new, something breath-taking.
“My! My!” Caesar might have said to himself. “Oo, la, la, how long has this been going on? Why haven’t we girls like that in Rome?”
Caesar was fifty-four and bald-headed, and Cleopatra was exuberant with the vitality of a youth of twenty-one; and as Caesar looked upon her, he was lifted, as if by a tidal wave, to the foamy crests of love and ecstasy. By the ardour of her passion and the brilliance of her mentality, she made Caesar her willing slave for life.
So this brother of hers was trying to kill her, was he? Well, Caesar swore that he would teach that young upstart a lesson; so, with his Roman legions, he marched out and annihilated the Egyptian army and chased her brother into the Nile where he was drowned.
From that time on, Cleopatra was the undisputed Queen of Egypt, holding dominion over all the lands of the Pharaohs.
Months went by, and Cleopatra presented Caesar with a son—the only son he ever had. With one wife back in Rome, of course Caesar couldn’t marry Cleopatra—you know how tongues will wag. So to hush up the scandal and legitimatize her son, Cleopatra used a brilliant piece of strategy. She ordered the priests to announce that Julius Caesar wasn’t a man at all. No. No. He was a God. He was the reincarnation of Ammon, the Sun God, and he had come back to earth in Caesar’s body to procreate a child for the Queen.
Sounds like a wild tale to me; but people believed it two thousand years ago in Egypt. I am afraid that Cleopatra would have a hard time getting by with that story now.
Shortly after that, Caesar was assassinated, and roaring old Mark Antony, always drunk, always in debt, became the mightiest Roman of them all. Intoxicated with the wine of victory, Mark Antony led his armies into the East, bent on loot and plunder and a life of dissipation.
Egypt was the richest country in the East; so some of Antony’s followers said to him when he was sober: “Look here, let’s go down to Alexandria, cut off Cleopatra’s head and feast on the flesh pots of Egypt.”
Cleopatra trembled. How could she stop Antony? With ships and swords? Never. With love and caresses? Yes, may be. So with a flair for the dramatic, with a genius for showmanship, she set out to meet Antony in a gilded ship with purple sails. Surrounding herself with all the pomp and pageantry of the Arabian Nights, she had little boys, painted as Cupids, fanning her with peacock feathers, while voluptuous maidens, swathed in silk, danced to the wild strains of desert music. The fragrance of burning incense intoxicated the senses; and, in the midst of all this oriental glamour, Cleopatra lay on a silken couch, enchanting, irresistible, posing as Venus, the Goddess of Love.
Well, now, there you are. What would you have done if you had been Mark Antony? Well, that is precisely what I would have done too. Why, if Mark Antony had been down in bed with rheumatism and dyspepsia, he couldn’t have resisted a girl like that. He didn’t even try.
