← Fame through time1878
1878
Whose working lives fell in 1878. 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 1878, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
William McKinley16 decades - 2
Henry James18 decades - 3
Robert Koch14 decades - 4
Bertha von Suttner13 decades - 5
Edvard Grieg12 decades - 6
Benito Pérez Galdós14 decades - 7
Frederick VIII of Denmark0 decades - 8
Princess Alice of the United Kingdomnot measured- - 9
Camillo Golgi15 decades - 10
Julio Argentino Roca12 decades - 11
Mikhail Skobelev4 decades - 12
Elisabeth of Wied0 decades - 13
Mercedes of Orléansnot measured- - 14
Georg von Hertling11 decades - 15
Emily Warren Roebling0 decades - 16
Kliment Timiryazev9 decades - 17
Peter Rosegger13 decades - 18
Adelina Patti16 decades - 19
Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz3 decades - 20
Gertrude Jekyll9 decades - 21
Robert Todd Lincoln10 decades - 22
Gabriel Tarde14 decades - 23
Antonio Labriola15 decades - 24
Anton von Werner15 decades - 25
Lydia Koidula0 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.