← Fame through time1885
1885
Whose working lives fell in 1885. 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 1885, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Robert Louis Stevenson15 decades - 2
Guy de Maupassant14 decades - 3
Alfonso XII of Spain0 decades - 4
Sofia Kovalevskaya14 decades - 5
Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener0 decades - 6
Pierre Loti14 decades - 7
Lafcadio Hearn14 decades - 8
Eduard Bernstein13 decades - 9
Mihai Eminescu5 decades - 10
Hipólito Yrigoyen11 decades - 11
Victoriano Huerta13 decades - 12
Oliver Heaviside10 decades - 13
Kate Chopin8 decades - 14
Prince Arthur, Duke of Connaught and Strathearnnot measured- - 15
Luigi Cadorna11 decades - 16
Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk1 decades - 17
Edward Smithnot measured- - 18
Frances Xavier Cabrini0 decades - 19
Karl Ferdinand Braun12 decades - 20
Marcelo H. del Pilar5 decades - 21
Hermann Ebbinghaus7 decades - 22
Edward Bellamy16 decades - 23
Charles Richet15 decades - 24
Henry Cabot Lodge15 decades - 25
Mikhail Chigorinnot measured-
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.