← 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 Chinese books during the 19th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Zhu Xi870 - 2
Li Hongzhang149 - 3
Zhang Zhidong86 - 4
Zuo Zongtang43 - 5
Ban Gu40 - 6
Ge Hong40 - 7Chen Shou14
- 8
Mao Zedong12 - 9
Lu Xun11
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 19th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Louis Pasteur14 decades - 2
Pierre Curie13 decades - 3
Gustave Eiffel10 decades - 4
Rudolf Diesel10 decades - 5
Louis Braille14 decades - 6
André-Marie Ampère15 decades - 7
Nicéphore Niépce6 decades - 8
Henri Becquerel15 decades - 9
Georges Cuvier21 decades - 10
Louis Daguerre1 decades - 11
Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnotnot measured- - 12
Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii0 decades - 13
Augustin-Jean Fresnel15 decades - 14
Joseph Louis Gay-Lussacnot measured- - 15
Léon Foucault14 decades - 16
Élie Metchnikoffnot measured- - 17
Camille Flammarion16 decades - 18
Clément Ader11 decades - 19
Urbain Le Verrier4 decades - 20
Marcellin Berthelot15 decades - 21
Gabriel Lippmann7 decades - 22
Henri Moissan8 decades - 23
Michel Eugène Chevreul1 decades - 24
Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinvillenot measured- - 25
Jean Eugène Robert-Houdinnot 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.