← Fame through time1850
1850
Whose working lives fell in 1850. 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 1850, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Otto von Bismarck16 decades - 2
Ada Lovelace3 decades - 3
John Bosco16 decades - 4
John A. Macdonald16 decades - 5
Báb12 decades - 6
Elizabeth Cady Stanton15 decades - 7
Otto of Greece0 decades - 8
Anthony Trollope17 decades - 9
Karl Weierstrass8 decades - 10
George Meade13 decades - 11
Julia Margaret Cameron5 decades - 12
Adolph von Menzel10 decades - 13
Louis Jules Trochu0 decades - 14
Harriet Jacobs3 decades - 15
Ľudovít Štúr0 decades - 16
Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier4 decades - 17
Henry Halleck2 decades - 18
Ildefons Cerdà13 decades - 19
James Curtis Hepburn0 decades - 20
Eugène Labiche16 decades - 21
Thomas Couture15 decades - 22
Rafael Carreranot measured- - 23
Emanuel Geibel18 decades - 24
Seru Epenisa Cakobaunot measured- - 25
Johann Jakob Bachofen10 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.