At age 11 New Zealander bill Phillips repaired an old bus and drove it to school with a few other peasant kids like him. At 15 he left school and became an electrical engineer. https://twitter.com/mattzeitlin/status/1262906700966825989

At age 21 he went to Australia, where he had several jobs including electrician in a gold mine, crocodile hunter, cinema manager.

In 1937 he decided to go to London through China and Russia, a bold move given the declaration of war from japan. He ended up reaching London with the transiberian

In London while working as an electrical engineer he followed courses at the London school of economics. In 1941 he mobilized for war with the RAF

He was sent for war to Java, Singapore, Burma, on a ship. When the ship was attacked by Japanese planes, he took an un mounted machine gun, built quickly an improvised mounting device, and manned the machine gun during 3 and a half hour against the enemy

(Try to picture this scene in a movie). He was eventually captured by the Japanese and sent to a POW camp. I there he learned Chinese, Russian, sociology, and built an improvised and secret boiling device for tea with the electrical wire of the camp.

When he was making tea the lights in the camp went down and the Japanese never understood why. After his release he went back to London, started following his studies in sociology but soon went to economics

Finding the keynesian model hard to understand he saw very soon that the equations were close to equations for fluid movements that he knew from engineering and went to build a hydraulic machine to simulate the uk economy.

You want to know how much an increase in investment spending will grow the economy? Just put the required amount of water in a jar and the machine will tell you. This was the MONIAC

The first and only hydraulic computer (a museum picture here)

Yes there is also the story about discovering the most famous curve in the history of macroeconomics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phillips_curve but this is almost irrelevant compared to the rest.