← 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 - 26
James Naismith3 decades - 27
Isambard Kingdom Brunel2 decades - 28
Ernst Haeckel16 decades - 29
Heinrich Hertz13 decades - 30
Thomas Henry Huxley16 decades - 31
Karl Benz11 decades - 32
André-Marie Ampère15 decades - 33
Jagadish Chandra Bose0 decades - 34
Ferdinand I of Bulgaria0 decades - 35
Humphry Davy22 decades - 36
Nicéphore Niépce6 decades - 37
Samuel Colt18 decades - 38
Peter Carl Fabergé3 decades - 39
George Stephenson22 decades - 40
Henri Becquerel15 decades - 41
Gottlieb Daimler11 decades - 42
Ernst Mach16 decades - 43
Hermann von Helmholtz14 decades - 44
Hendrik Lorentz0 decades - 45
Justus von Liebig17 decades - 46
Amedeo Avogadro19 decades - 47
Otto Lilienthal13 decades - 48
John Browningnot measured- - 49
Georg Ohm12 decades - 50
Werner von Siemens13 decades - 51
Georges Cuvier21 decades - 52
John Stith Pembertonnot measured- - 53
Nikolai Pirogov15 decades - 54
Louis Daguerre1 decades - 55
John Jacob Astor IV0 decades - 56
Charles George Gordon5 decades - 57
Svante Arrhenius6 decades - 58
Robert Fulton22 decades - 59
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnotnot measured- - 60
Hans Christian Ørsted0 decades - 61
William Thomson, 1st Baron Kelvinnot measured- - 62
James Prescott Joule3 decades - 63
Antonio Meucci14 decades - 64
Frederick Winslow Taylor8 decades - 65
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii0 decades - 66
Alexander Stepanovich Popov15 decades - 67
Gustav Kirchhoff4 decades - 68
Eli Whitney21 decades - 69
George Westinghouse15 decades - 70
Ferdinand von Zeppelin5 decades - 71
Oliver Heaviside10 decades - 72
Matthew C. Perry9 decades - 73
Richard Trevithick19 decades - 74
Philipp Lenard11 decades - 75
Sequoyah16 decades - 76
Robert Bosch13 decades - 77
Richard Owennot measured- - 78
Charles Goodyear19 decades - 79
Isaac Singer0 decades - 80
George Meade13 decades - 81
Ivan Michurin9 decades - 82
Josiah Willard Gibbs5 decades - 83
Albert A. Michelson0 decades - 84
Carl Zeiss13 decades - 85
Robert Bunsen9 decades - 86
Louis Agassiz16 decades - 87
August Kekulé4 decades - 88
Mary Somerville11 decades - 89
Edward Drinker Cope2 decades - 90
Joseph von Fraunhofer4 decades - 91
Augustin-Jean Fresnel15 decades - 92
Herman Hollerith4 decades - 93
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussacnot measured- - 94
Jöns Jacob Berzelius0 decades - 95
P. G. T. Beauregardnot measured- - 96
Léon Foucault14 decades - 97
Percival Lowell14 decades - 98
Wilhelm Ostwald13 decades - 99
Rudolf Clausius8 decades - 100
Élie Metchnikoffnot measured-
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.