← Fame through time1838
1838
Whose working lives fell in 1838. 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 1838, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Ralph Waldo Emerson19 decades - 2
Hector Berlioz19 decades - 3
Fyodor Tyutchev11 decades - 4
Prosper Mérimée19 decades - 5
Justus von Liebig17 decades - 6
Edward Bulwer-Lytton5 decades - 7
Christian Doppler8 decades - 8
Charles Lucien Bonaparte0 decades - 9
Adolphe Adam19 decades - 10
Robert Stephenson22 decades - 11
Flora Tristan13 decades - 12
James Brooke22 decades - 13
Sarah Childress Polk0 decades - 14
Albrecht von Roon13 decades - 15
Maria Anna of Savoy0 decades - 16
Gottfried Semper16 decades - 17
Osceola21 decades - 18
Albert Sidney Johnston16 decades - 19
Sarah Yorke Jackson0 decades - 20
Edgar Quinet19 decades - 21
John Sutter9 decades - 22
Friedrich Reinhold Kreutzwald0 decades - 23
Ferenc Deák0 decades - 24
John Ericsson19 decades - 25
Vladimir Odoevsky12 decades
How to read these rankings
- People sit in their own time. Everyone is placed in the century their working life belongs to, and never in one that came after their death.
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record, read across every language rather than one. 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. Those decades are closed, so each curve is measured once and kept.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, or a name belongs to more than one notable person, we would rather show nothing than guess.