← Fame through time1872
1872
Whose working lives fell in 1872. 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 1872, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Grover Cleveland14 decades - 2
Empress Elisabeth of Austria0 decades - 3
J. P. Morgan16 decades - 4
Alois Hitler8 decades - 5
Sadi Carnotnot measured- - 6
Paul Morphy7 decades - 7
Rosalía de Castro13 decades - 8
Tokugawa Yoshinobu0 decades - 9
Ivan Kramskoi11 decades - 10
Algernon Charles Swinburne16 decades - 11
Wild Bill Hickok10 decades - 12
Cosima Wagner13 decades - 13
Vasil Levski0 decades - 14
Johannes Diderik van der Waals0 decades - 15
Louis IV, Grand Duke of Hessenot measured- - 16
Ilia Chavchavadze9 decades - 17
Francis, Duke of Tecknot measured- - 18
Georges Ernest Boulanger0 decades - 19
Tippu Tip3 decades - 20
Yohannes IV0 decades - 21
Prince Philippe, Count of Flandersnot measured- - 22
Adam Opel12 decades - 23
Abraham Kuyper3 decades - 24
Nicolás Avellaneda17 decades - 25
Dwight Lyman Moody0 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.