[gamble]

It's not about the amount of knowledge, but changes in society that allow vastly more people to become specialists than in 1800. At that point the modern research university had not been invented yet, and science was still effectively restricted to a gentlemanly elite.

Today, universities turn out middle-class PhDs by the thousand, each grinding away in their own tiny corner of academia. The chance is rather small that someone who hasn't dedicated their life to an area can be competitive with the legions of specialists who have.