← Fame through time1909
1909
Whose working lives fell in 1909. 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 1909, ranked where Wikipedia coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Winston Churchill13 decades - 2
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 3
G. K. Chesterton12 decades - 4
Harry Houdini7 decades - 5
W. Somerset Maugham0 decades - 6
Ernest Shackleton11 decades - 7
Gertrude Stein10 decades - 8
Guglielmo Marconi13 decades - 9
Alexander Kolchak4 decades - 10
Robert Frost13 decades - 11
Lucy Maud Montgomery3 decades - 12
Howard Carter12 decades - 13
Arnold Schoenberg11 decades - 14
Chaim Weizmann11 decades - 15
Gustav Holst7 decades - 16
Talaat Pasha5 decades - 17
Nicholas Roerich7 decades - 18
John D. Rockefeller Jr.not measured- - 19
Sunjong of Koreanot measured- - 20
William Lyon Mackenzie Kingnot measured- - 21
Hugo von Hofmannsthal13 decades - 22
Luigi Einaudi13 decades - 23
Nikolai Berdyaev12 decades - 24
Vsevolod Meyerholdnot measured- - 25
Karl Kraus13 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.