← Fame through time1879
1879
Whose working lives fell in 1879. 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 1879, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Friedrich Nietzsche15 decades - 2
Sarah Bernhardt15 decades - 3
Paul Verlaine14 decades - 4
Ilya Repin10 decades - 5
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov9 decades - 6
Umberto I of Italy14 decades - 7
Alexandra of Denmark2 decades - 8
Bernadette Soubirous15 decades - 9
Anatole France15 decades - 10
Ludwig Boltzmann15 decades - 11
Mehmed V0 decades - 12
Mary Cassatt12 decades - 13
Henri Rousseau12 decades - 14
Karl Benz11 decades - 15
Menelik II14 decades - 16
Louis Riel15 decades - 17
Alfred, Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gothanot measured- - 18
Peter I of Serbia0 decades - 19
Muhammad Ahmad ibn ʿAbdallahnot measured- - 20
Garret Hobart0 decades - 21
Sophia Tolstaya10 decades - 22
Gerard Manley Hopkins9 decades - 23
Thomas Eakins12 decades - 24
Napoléon, Prince Imperialnot measured- - 25
Pablo de Sarasate11 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.