Who Was Alive

William Herschel

German-born British astronomer and composer

Born 15 November 1738 · died 25 August 1822, aged 83

Who was alive at the same time as William Herschel?

  1. Johann Sebastian Bach
  2. Voltaire
  3. Benjamin Franklin
  4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  5. Adam Smith
  6. Immanuel Kant
  7. George Washington
  8. William Herschel
  9. Thomas Jefferson
  10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  11. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  12. Ludwig van Beethoven
  13. Napoleon
  14. Lord Byron
  15. Alexander Pushkin
  16. Victor Hugo
  17. Hans Christian Andersen
  18. Edgar Allan Poe
  19. Abraham Lincoln
  20. Charles Darwin
  21. Charles Dickens
  22. Otto von Bismarck
  23. Karl Marx
  24. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
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 William Herschel was born, George Washington was 6, Johann Sebastian Bach was 53, Voltaire was 43, Immanuel Kant was 14 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was 26.

When William Herschel died, Karl Marx was 4, Abraham Lincoln was 13, Charles Darwin was 13, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 72 and Victor Hugo was 20.

Born during William Herschel’s lifetime: Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Charles Darwin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Victor Hugo.

Not quite contemporaries: Isaac Newton died 11 years before William Herschel was born, Leo Tolstoy was born 6 years after William Herschel died, Mark Twain was born 13 years after William Herschel died and Louis Pasteur was born months after William Herschel died.

Compare

All 230 contemporaries we track

  1. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  2. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  3. Napoleon 1769 – 1821
  4. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  5. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832
  6. George Washington 1732 – 1799
  7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 – 1791
  8. Ludwig van Beethoven c. 1770 – 1827
  9. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  10. Johann Sebastian Bach 1685 – 1750
  11. Voltaire 1694 – 1778
  12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  13. Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
  14. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  15. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  16. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
  18. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  19. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  20. Adam Smith 1723 – 1790
  21. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  22. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  23. Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790
  24. Carl Linnaeus 1707 – 1778
  25. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  26. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  27. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  28. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  29. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  30. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  31. Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783
  32. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  33. James Cook 1728 – 1779
  34. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  35. Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805
  36. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  37. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  38. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  39. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  40. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  41. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  42. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  43. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  44. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  45. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  46. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  47. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  48. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  49. Antonio Vivaldi 1678 – 1741
  50. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  51. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  52. Jonathan Swift 1667 – 1745
  53. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  54. George Frideric Handel 1685 – 1759
  55. Montesquieu 1689 – 1755
  56. James Watt 1736 – 1819
  57. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  58. David Hume 1711 – 1776
  59. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  60. Joseph Haydn 1732 – 1809
  61. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  62. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  63. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  64. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  65. Catherine II of Russia 1729 – 1796
  66. Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784
  67. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  68. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  69. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  70. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  71. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  72. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  73. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  74. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  75. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  76. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  77. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  78. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  79. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  80. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  81. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  82. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  83. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  84. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  85. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  86. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  87. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  88. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  89. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  90. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  91. Thomas Paine 1737 – 1809
  92. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  93. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  94. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  95. Samuel Johnson 1709 – 1784
  96. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  97. Marie Antoinette 1755 – 1793
  98. Maximilien Robespierre 1758 – 1794
  99. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  100. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  101. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  102. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  103. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  104. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  105. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  106. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  107. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  108. Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
  109. Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797
  110. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  111. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  112. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  113. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  114. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  115. Louis XVI of France 1754 – 1793
  116. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  117. Frederick II of Prussia 1712 – 1786
  118. Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797
  119. Robert Burns 1759 – 1796
  120. Felix Mendelssohn 1809 – 1847
  121. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
  122. Alexander Pope 1688 – 1744
  123. Eugène Delacroix 1798 – 1863
  124. André-Marie Ampère 1775 – 1836
  125. Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903
  126. Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881
  127. Alfred Tennyson 1809 – 1892
  128. Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811 – 1896
  129. Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
  130. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864
  131. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900
  132. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882
  133. Alexis de Tocqueville 1805 – 1859
  134. Leo XIII 1810 – 1903
  135. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert 1717 – 1783
  136. Edward Jenner 1749 – 1823
  137. Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762 – 1814
  138. Novalis 1772 – 1801
  139. Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871
  140. John Dalton 1766 – 1844
  141. Giacomo Leopardi 1798 – 1837
  142. Alexander I of Russia 1777 – 1825
  143. George Berkeley 1685 – 1753
  144. Mikhail Lomonosov 1711 – 1765
  145. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck 1744 – 1829
  146. Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 – 1872
  147. Washington Irving 1783 – 1859
  148. Alphonse de Lamartine 1790 – 1869
  149. Pius IX 1792 – 1878
  150. George III of Great Britain 1738 – 1820

The 150 best known are listed.