← Fame through time1859
1859
Whose working lives fell in 1859. 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 1859, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Alexandre Dumas filsnot measured- - 2
Stonewall Jackson16 decades - 3
Anton Bruckner14 decades - 4
Bedřich Smetana0 decades - 5
Wilkie Collins17 decades - 6
Jean-Léon Gérôme4 decades - 7
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvinnot measured- - 8
Gustav Kirchhoff4 decades - 9
Leland Stanford16 decades - 10
Levi P. Morton11 decades - 11
Eugène Boudin12 decades - 12
William Walkernot measured- - 13
Ambrose Burnside3 decades - 14
Paul Broca15 decades - 15
Winfield Scott Hancock8 decades - 16
Pierre Puvis de Chavannes3 decades - 17
Francisco Pi y Margall17 decades - 18
Maria Alexandrovna0 decades - 19
Mikhail Loris-Melikov0 decades - 20
Pierre Janssen3 decades - 21
William Magear Tweed0 decades - 22
George MacDonald16 decades - 23
Michael Madhusudan Dutt0 decades - 24
Yoshida Shōin0 decades - 25
Carl Reinecke17 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.