← Fame through time1881
1881
Whose working lives fell in 1881. 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 1881, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Billy the Kid12 decades - 2
Buffalo Bill15 decades - 3
Peter Carl Fabergé3 decades - 4
Henryk Sienkiewicz11 decades - 5
Auguste Escoffier4 decades - 6
George Westinghouse15 decades - 7
Nicholas Miklouho-Maclay5 decades - 8
Princess Helena of the United Kingdomnot measured- - 9
Isabel, Princess Imperial of Brazilnot measured- - 10
Edmondo De Amicis16 decades - 11
Charles Stewart Parnell14 decades - 12
Wilhelm Maybach8 decades - 13
Léon Bloy14 decades - 14
Rose Cleveland0 decades - 15
Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche12 decades - 16
Daniel Burnham7 decades - 17
Sophia Perovskaya12 decades - 18
Rudolf Christoph Eucken15 decades - 19
Wladimir Köppen0 decades - 20
Vasili Dokuchayev7 decades - 21
Prince Leopold of Bavaria15 decades - 22
Anna Dostoyevskaya6 decades - 23
Naim Frashëri0 decades - 24
Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau2 decades - 25
Franz Mehring15 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.