Who Was Alive

John D. Rockefeller

American industrialist and philanthropist

Born 8 July 1839 · died 23 May 1937, aged 97

Who was alive at the same time as John D. Rockefeller?

  1. Victor Hugo
  2. Abraham Lincoln
  3. Charles Darwin
  4. Karl Marx
  5. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  6. Leo Tolstoy
  7. Mark Twain
  8. John D. Rockefeller
  9. Friedrich Nietzsche
  10. Thomas Edison
  11. Vincent van Gogh
  12. Sigmund Freud
  13. Mahatma Gandhi
  14. Vladimir Lenin
  15. Winston Churchill
  16. Joseph Stalin
  17. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  18. Albert Einstein
  19. Pablo Picasso
  20. Charlie Chaplin
  21. Adolf Hitler
  22. Ronald Reagan
  23. Nelson Mandela
  24. Elizabeth II
Drag across the timeline to see who was alive in any year and the age each person reached that year. Faded ends mark uncertain dates.

When John D. Rockefeller was born, Karl Marx was 21, Abraham Lincoln was 30, Leo Tolstoy was 10, Charles Darwin was 30 and Victor Hugo was 37.

When John D. Rockefeller died, Adolf Hitler was 48, Albert Einstein was 58, Ronald Reagan was 26, Nelson Mandela was 18 and Mahatma Gandhi was 67.

Born during John D. Rockefeller’s lifetime: Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Lenin, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Vincent van Gogh.

Not quite contemporaries: Donald Trump was born 9 years after John D. Rockefeller died, George W. Bush was born 9 years after John D. Rockefeller died, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died 7 years before John D. Rockefeller was born and Joe Biden was born 5 years after John D. Rockefeller died.

Compare

All 902 contemporaries we track

  1. Adolf Hitler 1889 – 1945
  2. Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
  3. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  4. Ronald Reagan 1911 – 2004
  5. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  6. Vladimir Lenin 1870 – 1924
  7. Nelson Mandela 1918 – 2013
  8. Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948
  9. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  10. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  11. Joseph Stalin 1878 – 1953
  12. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  13. Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
  14. Pablo Picasso 1881 – 1973
  15. Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965
  16. Charlie Chaplin 1889 – 1977
  17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  18. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  19. Elizabeth II 1926 – 2022
  20. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  21. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1879–1881 – 1938
  22. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  23. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  24. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  25. John F. Kennedy 1917 – 1963
  26. Marie Curie 1867 – 1934
  27. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968
  28. Salvador Dalí 1904 – 1989
  29. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  30. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945
  31. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  32. Franz Kafka 1883 – 1924
  33. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  34. Marilyn Monroe 1926 – 1962
  35. Pope Francis 1936 – 2025
  36. Mao Zedong 1893 – 1976
  37. Che Guevara 1928 – 1967
  38. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  39. Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
  40. Charles de Gaulle 1890 – 1970
  41. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  42. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  43. Neil Armstrong 1930 – 2012
  44. Walt Disney 1901 – 1966
  45. Elvis Presley 1935 – 1977
  46. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  47. George Orwell 1903 – 1950
  48. Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961
  49. Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013
  50. James Joyce 1882 – 1941
  51. John Paul II 1920 – 2005
  52. Gabriel García Márquez 1927 – 2014
  53. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  54. Fidel Castro 1926 – 2016
  55. J. R. R. Tolkien 1892 – 1973
  56. Albert Camus 1913 – 1960
  57. Yuri Gagarin 1934 – 1968
  58. Henry Ford 1863 – 1947
  59. Marlene Dietrich 1901 – 1992
  60. Mikhail Gorbachev 1931 – 2022
  61. Benito Mussolini 1883 – 1945
  62. Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980
  63. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  64. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  65. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  66. Le Corbusier 1887 – 1965
  67. Frida Kahlo 1907 – 1954
  68. Mother Teresa 1910 – 1997
  69. Jimmy Carter 1924 – 2024
  70. Benedict XVI 1927 – 2022
  71. Harry S. Truman 1884 – 1972
  72. Agatha Christie 1890 – 1976
  73. George H. W. Bush 1924 – 2018
  74. Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986
  75. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  76. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  77. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  78. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  79. Jawaharlal Nehru 1889 – 1964
  80. Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922
  81. Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890 – 1969
  82. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  83. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  84. Rosa Luxemburg 1871 – 1919
  85. Roald Amundsen 1872 – c. 1928
  86. Alan Turing 1912 – 1954
  87. Richard Nixon 1913 – 1994
  88. Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
  89. Alfred Hitchcock 1899 – 1980
  90. Noam Chomsky born 1928
  91. Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986
  92. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  93. John Maynard Keynes 1883 – 1946
  94. Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962
  95. Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970
  96. Leon Trotsky 1879 – 1940
  97. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  98. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  99. Maxim Gorky 1868 – 1936
  100. Henri Matisse 1869 – 1954
  101. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  102. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  103. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  104. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  105. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 – 1959
  106. Andy Warhol 1928 – 1987
  107. Louis Armstrong 1901 – 1971
  108. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  109. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  110. Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941
  111. Akira Kurosawa 1910 – 1998
  112. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  113. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  114. Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 – 1973
  115. Gerald Ford 1913 – 2006
  116. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  117. Ernest Rutherford 1871 – 1937
  118. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951
  119. Indira Gandhi 1917 – 1984
  120. Max Weber 1864 – 1920
  121. Huang Xianfan 1899 – 1982
  122. Enrico Fermi 1901 – 1954
  123. Naguib Mahfouz 1911 – 2006
  124. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  125. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  126. Nikita Khrushchev 1894 – 1971
  127. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944
  128. Anne Frank 1929 – 1945
  129. Saddam Hussein 1937 – 2006
  130. H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946
  131. Helen Keller 1880 – 1968
  132. Tenzin Gyatso born 1935
  133. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  134. Pablo Neruda 1904 – 1973
  135. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  136. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  137. Igor Stravinsky 1882 – 1971
  138. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  139. David Hilbert 1862 – 1943
  140. Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955
  141. Erwin Schrödinger 1887 – 1961
  142. Silvio Berlusconi 1936 – 2023
  143. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  144. Herbert Hoover 1874 – 1964
  145. Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962
  146. Isaac Asimov 1919–1920 – 1992
  147. Ingmar Bergman 1918 – 2007
  148. Federico Fellini 1920 – 1993
  149. Mahathir Mohamad born 1925
  150. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897

The 150 best known are listed.