← Fame through time1844
1844
Whose working lives fell in 1844. 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 1844, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Abraham Lincoln22 decades - 2
Edgar Allan Poe17 decades - 3
Charles Darwin21 decades - 4
Nikolai Gogol19 decades - 5
Felix Mendelssohn18 decades - 6
Alfred Tennyson19 decades - 7
William Ewart Gladstone18 decades - 8
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon8 decades - 9
Louis Braille14 decades - 10
Georges-Eugène Haussmann0 decades - 11
Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.not measured- - 12
Albert Pike18 decades - 13
Bruno Bauer19 decades - 14
Joseph Jenkins Roberts0 decades
- 15
Bettino Ricasoli22 decades - 16
Hermann Grassmann4 decades - 17
Cyrus McCormick12 decades - 18
Joseph Liouville0 decades - 19
Edward FitzGerald13 decades - 20
Grand Duchess Alexandra Nikolaevna of Russia19 decades - 21
Khachatur Abovian0 decades - 22
Juliusz Słowacki0 decades - 23
Leopoldo O'Donnell, 1st Duke of Tetuan18 decades - 24
Kit Carson18 decades - 25
Hannibal Hamlin18 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.