← 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
Carl Linnaeus7 decades - 2
Mikhail Lomonosov19 decades - 3
Antoine Lavoisier2 decades - 4
James Watt22 decades - 5
Alessandro Volta22 decades - 6
William Herschel22 decades - 7
Emanuel Swedenborg0 decades
- 8
Tadeusz Kościuszko0 decades - 9
Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit1 decades - 10
Jean-Baptiste Lamarck2 decades - 11
Joseph Priestley22 decades - 12
Anders Celsius0 decades - 13
Abram Petrovich Gannibal7 decades - 14
John Harrison22 decades - 15
Charles-Augustin de Coulomb0 decades - 16
Caroline Herschel10 decades
- 17
Georg Christoph Lichtenberg17 decades - 18
Joseph Banks22 decades - 19
William Carey22 decades - 20
Carl Wilhelm Scheele8 decades - 21
Nicolas Appert6 decades - 22
James Hutton22 decades - 23
Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot0 decades - 24
Thomas Telford22 decades - 25
Charles Messier1 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.