← Fame through time1880-1889
The 1880s
Whose names filled the books of the 1880s - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in Chinese books during the 1880s, whenever they lived.
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 1880s, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Vincent van Gogh12 decades - 2
Oscar Wilde14 decades - 3
Thomas Edison13 decades - 4
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 5
Arthur Rimbaud14 decades - 6
Antoni Gaudí5 decades - 7
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 8
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 9
Paul von Hindenburg10 decades - 10
Alexander III of Russia16 decades - 11
Paul Gauguin13 decades - 12
Bram Stoker12 decades - 13
Emperor Meiji11 decades - 14
Ivan Pavlov16 decades - 15
Cecil Rhodes12 decades - 16
Wilhelm Röntgen11 decades - 17
Pope Benedict XV11 decades - 18
José Martí16 decades - 19
Ludwig II of Bavarianot measured- - 20
Billy the Kid12 decades - 21
Henri Poincaré13 decades - 22
H. H. Asquith11 decades - 23
Ferdinand Foch7 decades - 24
Annie Besant15 decades - 25
George I of Greece0 decades - 26
Georg Cantor14 decades - 27
Arthur Balfour15 decades - 28
Santiago Ramón y Cajal13 decades - 29
Alfonso XII of Spain0 decades - 30
Jesse James14 decades - 31
Raja Ravi Varma0 decades - 32
Chulalongkorn13 decades - 33
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 34
Joseph Pulitzer14 decades - 35
Rudolf, Crown Prince of Austria0 decades - 36
Maria Feodorovna17 decades - 37
Viktor Vasnetsov10 decades - 38
August Strindberg8 decades - 39
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener0 decades - 40
Sofia Kovalevskaya14 decades - 41
Gabriel Fauré14 decades - 42
Sergei Witte9 decades - 43
Paul Ehrlich13 decades - 44
Ned Kelly11 decades - 45
Abay Kunanbaiuly8 decades - 46
Gottlob Frege9 decades - 47
Frances Hodgson Burnett15 decades - 48
Joseph Joffre2 decades - 49
Wyatt Earp10 decades - 50
Amadeo I of Spainnot measured- - 51
Peter Carl Fabergé3 decades - 52
Vilfredo Pareto13 decades - 53
Henri Becquerel15 decades - 54
Hendrik Lorentz0 decades - 55
Pierre Loti14 decades - 56
Otto Lilienthal13 decades - 57
Vladimir Solovyov14 decades - 58
Henryk Sienkiewicz11 decades - 59
Édouard-Henri Avril5 decades - 60
Aleksei Brusilov3 decades - 61
August von Mackensen2 decades - 62
Charles Taze Russell0 decades - 63
Karl Kautsky13 decades - 64
Gustave Caillebotte5 decades - 65
Gojong of Koreanot measured- - 66
Max Liebermann13 decades - 67
Ludwig III of Bavarianot measured- - 68
Auguste Escoffier4 decades - 69
Lafcadio Hearn14 decades - 70
Emil von Behring11 decades - 71
John William Waterhouse0 decades - 72
Helmuth von Moltke the Younger0 decades - 73
Joris-Karl Huysmans11 decades - 74
Vasily Surikov8 decades - 75
Olga Constantinovna of Russia16 decades - 76
Eduard Bernstein13 decades - 77
Anandi Gopal Joshinot measured- - 78
Octave Mirbeau14 decades - 79
Mihai Eminescu5 decades - 80
Calamity Jane11 decades - 81
Hipólito Yrigoyen11 decades - 82
John Philip Sousa13 decades - 83
Victoriano Huerta13 decades - 84
Vladimir Korolenko13 decades - 85
Leoš Janáček0 decades - 86
George Westinghouse15 decades - 87
Oliver Heaviside10 decades - 88
Alexander Ulyanov11 decades - 89
Kate Chopin8 decades - 90
Thomas R. Marshall8 decades - 91
Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay5 decades - 92
Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearnnot measured- - 93
Margaret of Savoy17 decades - 94
Tōgō Heihachirō0 decades - 95
Bernhard von Bülow12 decades - 96
Luigi Cadorna11 decades - 97
Georges Sorel12 decades - 98
Lord Randolph Churchill15 decades - 99
Archibald Primrose, 5th Earl of Roseberynot measured- - 100
Elihu Root14 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. 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.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.