Who Was Alive
Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers
Rudolph Suhrlandt, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

German physician and astronomer

Born 11 October 1758 · died 2 March 1840, aged 81
Also known as Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, Heinrich Olbers

Who was alive at the same time as Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers?

Drag across the timeline, or use the arrow keys, to see who was alive in any year and the age each person reached that year. Dashed lines mark world events. Faded ends mark uncertain dates.

When Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was born, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 9, George Washington was 26, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was 2, Voltaire was 63 and Immanuel Kant was 34.

When Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers died, Karl Marx was 21, Abraham Lincoln was 31, Leo Tolstoy was 11, Charles Darwin was 31 and Victor Hugo was 38.

Born during Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers’s lifetime: Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, Victor Hugo and Fyodor Dostoevsky.

Not quite contemporaries: Vincent van Gogh was born about 13 years after Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers died, Johann Sebastian Bach died about 8 years before Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers was born, Friedrich Nietzsche was born about 4 years after Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers died and Thomas Edison was born about 7 years after Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers died.

What happened in Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers’s lifetime

Where Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers’s contemporaries were born

Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers is labelled; the others are the best-known people we track who lived at the same time. Each dot is a birthplace from Wikidata (80 of 81 placed); tap one to open that person.
Birthplaces as a list

Compare Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers

The 150 best-known contemporaries

639 of the people we track were surely alive at the same time as Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers. The 150 best known are listed here. See also everyone alive in 1799.

  1. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  2. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  3. Napoleon 1769 – 1821
  4. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  5. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832
  7. George Washington 1732 – 1799
  8. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 – 1791
  9. Ludwig van Beethoven c. 1770 – 1827
  10. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  11. Voltaire 1694 – 1778
  12. Fyodor Dostoevsky 1821 – 1881
  13. Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
  14. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  15. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  16. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  17. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  18. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
  19. Adam Smith 1723 – 1790
  20. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  21. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  22. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  23. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  24. Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790
  25. Carl Linnaeus 1707 – 1778
  26. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  27. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  28. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  29. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  30. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  31. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  32. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  33. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  34. Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783
  35. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  36. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  37. James Cook 1728 – 1779
  38. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  39. Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805
  40. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  41. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  42. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  43. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  44. Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  45. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  46. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  47. Queen Victoria 1819 – 1901
  48. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  49. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  50. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  51. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  52. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  53. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  54. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  55. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  56. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  57. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  58. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  59. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  60. George Frideric Handel 1685 – 1759
  61. James Watt 1736 – 1819
  62. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  63. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  64. David Hume 1711 – 1776
  65. Joseph Haydn 1732 – 1809
  66. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  67. Nikolai Gogol c. 1809 – c. 1852
  68. Lewis Carroll 1832 – 1898
  69. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  70. Catherine the Great 1729 – 1796
  71. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  72. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  73. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  74. Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784
  75. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  76. James A. Garfield 1831 – 1881
  77. Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
  78. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  79. Grover Cleveland 1837 – 1908
  80. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  81. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  82. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  83. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  84. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  85. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  86. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  87. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  88. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  89. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  90. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  91. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  92. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  93. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  94. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  95. Rutherford B. Hayes 1822 – 1893
  96. Paul Cézanne 1839 – 1906
  97. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  98. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  99. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  100. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  101. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  102. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  103. Benjamin Harrison 1833 – 1901
  104. Thomas Paine 1737 – 1809
  105. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  106. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  107. Samuel Johnson 1709 – 1784
  108. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  109. Marie Antoinette 1755 – 1793
  110. Maximilien Robespierre 1758 – 1794
  111. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  112. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  113. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  114. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  115. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  116. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  117. Chester A. Arthur 1829 – 1886
  118. Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797
  119. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  120. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  121. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  122. Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
  123. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  124. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  125. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  126. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  127. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  128. Louis XVI 1754 – 1793
  129. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  130. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson 1832 – 1910
  131. Frederick the Great 1712 – 1786
  132. Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797
  133. Robert Burns 1759 – 1796
  134. Felix Mendelssohn 1809 – 1847
  135. Frédéric Mistral 1830 – 1914
  136. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
  137. Giosuè Carducci 1835 – 1907
  138. Sully Prudhomme 1839 – 1907
  139. Eugène Delacroix 1798 – 1863
  140. André-Marie Ampère 1775 – 1836
  141. Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903
  142. Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881
  143. Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811 – 1896
  144. Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1809 – 1892
  145. Pope Pius X 1835 – 1914
  146. Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
  147. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864
  148. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900
  149. Edgar Degas 1834 – 1917
  150. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882