← Fame through time1896
1896
Whose working lives fell in 1896. 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 1896, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Rabindranath Tagore11 decades - 2
José Rizal13 decades - 3
Rudolf Steiner14 decades - 4
Mehmed VI0 decades - 5
Georges Méliès9 decades - 6
Fridtjof Nansen13 decades - 7
James Naismith3 decades - 8
Alfred North Whitehead10 decades - 9
Ferdinand I of Bulgaria0 decades - 10
Lou Andreas-Salomé1 decades - 11
Italo Svevo10 decades - 12
Douglas Haig, 1st Earl Haignot measured- - 13
Georgy Lvov2 decades - 14
Erich von Falkenhayn6 decades - 15
H. H. Holmes2 decades - 16
Robert Bosch13 decades - 17
Luigi Facta12 decades - 18
Armando Diaz11 decades - 19
Nellie Melba10 decades - 20
Victor Horta11 decades - 21
Ranavalona III0 decades - 22
Konstantin Korovin9 decades - 23
Edmund Allenby, 1st Viscount Allenbynot measured- - 24
Prince Carl, Duke of Västergötlandnot measured- - 25
Halford Mackinder7 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.