← Fame through time1899
1899
Whose working lives fell in 1899. 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 1899, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Max Weber15 decades - 2
Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec10 decades - 3
Richard Strauss13 decades - 4
Miguel de Unamuno14 decades - 5
George Washington Carver9 decades - 6
Nellie Bly13 decades - 7
Camille Claudel11 decades - 8
Eleftherios Venizelos2 decades - 9
Alois Alzheimer3 decades - 10
John Jacob Astor IV0 decades - 11
Frances Cleveland0 decades - 12
Hermann Minkowski9 decades - 13
Princess Elisabeth of Hesse and by Rhinenot measured- - 14
Maurice Leblanc14 decades - 15
Alfred Stieglitz13 decades - 16
Princess Stéphanie of Belgium0 decades - 17
Roger Casement11 decades - 18
Frank Wedekind12 decades - 19
Jules Renard13 decades - 20
Walther Nernst12 decades - 21
Apolinario Mabini2 decades - 22
Grand Duke George Alexandrovich of Russia15 decades - 23
Wilhelm Wien9 decades - 24
Ricarda Huch13 decades - 25
Reginald Dyer0 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.