[Donald]

1600 - 1699: 2

1700 - 1799: 18

1800 - 1899: 79

1900 - 1999: 58

Still, given the population explosion, it's unlikely that there were fewer autodidacts in the 20th century than in the 19th.

Raw data: http://pastie.org/783067

[og1]

Also consider the set of people born 1950 onward. They will not be included because they are on the cusp of being famous and haven't gone through their entire careers yet.

[mahmud]

Excellent scraping there. The figure you want is just the first number, the birth year. The number 1999 is meaningless, it's not a birth year, but the year Stanley Kubrick died. You want \((\\d+)-

[tel]

Drawing conclusions from the data is misleading. The original set is not comprehensive and any human trends you might look for are surely obscured by uncontrolled variation.

[davidw]

College access is far broader in the 20th century, though, too, especially from the 50'ies onwards; at least in the US.