← Fame through time1700-1799
The 18th century
Whose working lives fell in the 18th century. 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 the 18th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
George Washington22 decades - 2
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart21 decades - 3
Thomas Jefferson22 decades - 4
Benjamin Franklin22 decades - 5
Johann Sebastian Bach22 decades - 6
Peter the Great21 decades - 7
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe14 decades - 8
Immanuel Kant22 decades - 9
John Adams22 decades - 10
Voltaire22 decades - 11
Catherine the Great22 decades - 12
Marie Antoinette22 decades - 13
James Cook22 decades - 14
Jean-Jacques Rousseau22 decades - 15
James Madison22 decades - 16
Maximilien Robespierre14 decades - 17
Leonhard Euler22 decades - 18
Francisco Goya18 decades - 19
Alexander Hamilton22 decades - 20
Adam Smith22 decades - 21
Carl Linnaeus7 decades - 22
William Blake22 decades - 23
Frederick the Great22 decades - 24
Antonio Vivaldi14 decades - 25
James Monroe22 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.