← Fame through time1800-1899
The 19th century
Whose names filled the books of the 19th century - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in English books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Jesus94 - 2
Homer15 - 3
Cicero13 - 4
Augustus13 - 5
Plato10 - 6
Virgil9.6 - 7
Aristotle9.4 - 8
Socrates6.4 - 9
Herodotus6.2 - 10
Plutarch5.6 - 11
Ovid4.2 - 12
Strabo4.1 - 13
Charlemagne3.9 - 14
Demosthenes3.8 - 15
Lord Byron3.6 - 16
Livy3.4 - 17
Origen3.1 - 18
Cleopatra3.0 - 19
Xenophon3.0 - 20
Walter Scott3.0 - 21
Tertullian2.7 - 22
James II, Count of Urgell2.6 - 23
Robert Peel2.6 - 24
Henry VII, Holy Roman Emperor2.6 - 25
Pericles2.5
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Nikola Tesla13 decades - 2
Charles Darwin21 decades - 3
Thomas Edison13 decades - 4
Alexander Graham Bell15 decades - 5
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 6
Alfred Nobel13 decades - 7
Dmitri Mendeleev11 decades - 8
Michael Faraday20 decades - 9
Max Planck14 decades - 10
James Clerk Maxwell14 decades - 11
Gregor Mendel12 decades - 12
Pierre Curie13 decades - 13
Gustave Eiffel10 decades - 14
Ivan Pavlov16 decades - 15
Wilhelm Röntgen11 decades - 16
Konstantin Tsiolkovsky5 decades - 17
George Washington Carver9 decades - 18
J. J. Thomson0 decades - 19
Rudolf Diesel10 decades - 20
John Dalton22 decades - 21
Santiago Ramón y Cajal13 decades - 22
Samuel Morse0 decades - 23
Ludwig Boltzmann15 decades - 24
Louis Braille14 decades - 25
John Muir19 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.