← Fame through time1870
1870
Whose working lives fell in 1870. 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 1870, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Mark Twain16 decades - 2
Andrew Carnegie14 decades - 3
Leopold II of Belgium9 decades - 4
Pope Pius X12 decades - 5
Empress Dowager Cixi5 decades - 6
Camille Saint-Saëns15 decades - 7
Giosuè Carducci17 decades - 8
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer13 decades - 9
Mirza Ghulam Ahmad4 decades - 10
Cesare Lombroso16 decades - 11
Frédéric Bazille9 decades - 12
César Cui9 decades - 13
Comte de Lautréamont8 decades - 14
Adolf von Baeyer12 decades - 15
Giovanni Schiaparelli15 decades - 16
William Stanley Jevons5 decades - 17
Rebecca Latimer Felton0 decades - 18
Maria Ulyanova8 decades - 19
Nikolai Rubinstein10 decades - 20
Henryk Wieniawski0 decades - 21
Elisha Gray9 decades - 22
Simon Newcomb16 decades - 23
Josef Stefan4 decades - 24
Tomás Estrada Palma13 decades - 25
Ferdinand IV, Grand Duke of Tuscanynot measured-
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.