← Fame through time1740-1749
The 1740s
Whose working lives fell in the 1740s. Books are measured from 1800 and readers from 2015, so for this period we can say who lived then, not who was talked about then.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1740s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Benjamin Franklin22 decades - 2
Jean-Jacques Rousseau22 decades - 3
Leonhard Euler22 decades - 4
Carl Linnaeus7 decades - 5
Frederick the Great22 decades - 6
David Hume22 decades - 7
Mikhail Lomonosov19 decades - 8
Louis XV of France22 decades - 9
Elizabeth of Russia20 decades - 10
Samuel Johnson22 decades - 11
Denis Diderot21 decades - 12
Qianlong Emperor3 decades - 13
Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor6 decades - 14
Ferdinand VI of Spain4 decades - 15
Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach15 decades - 16
William Pitt, 1st Earl of Chathamnot measured- - 17
Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffonnot measured- - 18
Carlo Goldoni22 decades - 19
Christoph Willibald Gluck9 decades - 20
Frederick, Prince of Wales0 decades - 21
Henry Fielding22 decades - 22
Pope Clement XIV20 decades - 23
Count of St. Germain7 decades - 24
Laurence Sterne22 decades - 25
Farinelli22 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.