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An investment in knowledge pays the best interest. I was born the fifteenth child of a soap-maker and received two years of formal schooling. Everything else I taught myself: by reading every book I could borrow, by joining the Junto — a club for mutual improvement I founded at twenty — by corresponding with the best minds in Europe, and by pursuing curiosity wherever it led, from electrical experiments to the design of stoves. The principal cost was time. The return was everything I became.