← Fame through time1846
1846
Whose working lives fell in 1846. 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 1846, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Franz Liszt19 decades - 2
Harriet Beecher Stowe17 decades - 3
William Makepeace Thackeray17 decades - 4
Théophile Gautier19 decades - 5
Vissarion Belinsky15 decades - 6
Domingo Faustino Sarmiento18 decades - 7
Maximilian II of Bavaria0 decades - 8
Emperor Norton0 decades - 9
Isaac Singer0 decades - 10
Robert Bunsen9 decades - 11
Urbain Le Verrier4 decades - 12
Augusta of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenachnot measured- - 13
Louis Blanc20 decades - 14
Elisha Otis0 decades - 15
Charles Sumner19 decades - 16
Judah P. Benjamin16 decades - 17
François Achille Bazaine0 decades - 18
Zeng Guofan8 decades
- 19
Andrew Kim Taegon0 decades - 20
Horace Greeley18 decades - 21
John William Draper7 decades - 22
John Neumann1 decades - 23
James Bruce, 8th Earl of Elginnot measured- - 24
Wendell Phillips18 decades - 25
Ambroise Thomas19 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.