← Fame through time1869
1869
Whose working lives fell in 1869. 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 1869, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Dmitri Mendeleev11 decades - 2
Edgar Degas11 decades - 3
William Morris19 decades - 4
Ernst Haeckel16 decades - 5
Charles Spurgeon6 decades - 6
Gottlieb Daimler11 decades - 7
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi4 decades - 8
John Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Actonnot measured- - 9
James Abbott McNeill Whistler12 decades - 10
John Vennnot measured- - 11
José Hernández18 decades - 12
John Wesley Powell12 decades - 13
Léon Walras16 decades - 14
Amilcare Ponchielli15 decades - 15
Hetty Green7 decades - 16
Heinrich von Treitschke16 decades - 17
August Weismann15 decades - 18
Aleksis Kivi0 decades - 19
Jan Neruda6 decades - 20
Johann Philipp Reis0 decades - 21
John Lubbock, 1st Baron Aveburynot measured- - 22
Duchess Helene in Bavarianot measured- - 23
Carl Bloch0 decades - 24
Samuel Pierpont Langleynot measured- - 25
Norodom of Cambodia0 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.