The more he listened to his friend's description of the Ecole Polytechnique of Paris, that day in the 1830s, the more excited became Manhattan's great Philanthropist Peter Cooper. Once a $25-a-year apprentice to a coachmaker. Cooper had risen to fame and fortune with only about a year's formal schooling behind him. But in Paris, according to his friend, there were hundreds of poor young men willing to live "on a bare crust of bread" to attend the Ecole. As the friend went on, Cooper began to think: "How glad I should have been to have found such an institution in the...
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