Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1856?

210 of the people we track were surely alive in 1856. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1856: Sigmund Freud, Nikola Tesla, Woodrow Wilson, George Bernard Shaw, Joseph John Thomson and Philippe Pétain.

Died in 1856: Heinrich Heine, Robert Schumann, Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, Amedeo Avogadro and Max Stirner.

  1. Karl Marx38
  2. Abraham Lincoln47
  3. Leo Tolstoy28
  4. Charles Darwin47
  5. Victor Hugo54
  6. Vincent van Gogh3
  7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky35
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche12
  9. Thomas Edison9
  10. Mark Twain21
  11. Sigmund Freudborn
  12. Charles Dickens44
  13. Hans Christian Andersen51
  14. Oscar Wilde2
  15. Otto von Bismarck41
  16. Nikola Teslaborn
  17. Louis Pasteur34
  18. Richard Wagner43
  19. Friedrich Engels36
  20. Sarah Bernhardt12
  21. Alfred Nobel23
  22. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky16
  23. Jules Verne28
  24. Woodrow Wilsonborn
  25. George Bernard Shawborn
  26. Michael Faraday65
  27. Giuseppe Verdi43
  28. Charles Baudelaire35
  29. Dmitri Mendeleev22
  30. Arthur Schopenhauer68
  31. Victoria37
  32. Alexandre Dumas54
  33. Henrik Ibsen28
  34. Heinrich Heine58 †
  35. Émile Zola16
  36. James Clerk Maxwell25
  37. Johannes Brahms23
  38. Anatole France12
  39. Alexander Graham Bell9
  40. Octave Mirbeau8
  41. Gustave Flaubert35
  42. Ulysses S. Grant34
  43. Lewis Carroll24
  44. Wilhelm Röntgen11
  45. Ralph Waldo Emerson53
  46. Claude Monet16
  47. Guy de Maupassant6
  48. Robert Louis Stevenson6
  49. Ivan Turgenev38
  50. John Stuart Mill50
  51. Florence Nightingale36
  52. Antonín Dvořák15
  53. Walt Whitman37
  54. James A. Garfield25
  55. Emily Dickinson26
  56. Martin Van Buren74
  57. Grover Cleveland19
  58. Andrew Johnson48
  59. Henry David Thoreau39
  60. James Buchanan65
  61. Arthur Rimbaud2
  62. John Tyler66
  63. Mikhail Bakunin42
  64. William McKinley13
  65. Alexander von Humboldt87
  66. Millard Fillmore56
  67. Franklin Pierce52
  68. Rutherford B. Hayes34
  69. Paul Cézanne17
  70. Henryk Sienkiewicz10
  71. Benjamin Disraeli52
  72. Taras Shevchenko42
  73. George Eliot37
  74. George Sand52
  75. Benjamin Harrison23
  76. Hector Berlioz53
  77. James Prescott Joule38
  78. Gregor Mendel34
  79. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres76
  80. Auguste Comte58
  81. Paul Gauguin8
  82. Chester A. Arthur27
  83. Giuseppe Garibaldi49
  84. Robert Schumann46 †
  85. Herman Melville37
  86. Auguste Rodin16
  87. Antoni Gaudí4
  88. Henri Poincaré2
  89. Napoleon III48
  90. Franz Liszt45
  91. Theodor Mommsen39
  92. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson24
  93. Robert Koch13
  94. Frédéric Mistral26
  95. William James14
  96. Ivan Pavlov7
  97. Giosuè Carducci21
  98. Sully Prudhomme17
  99. Eugène Delacroix58
  100. Herbert Spencer36
  101. Joseph John Thomsonborn
  102. Thomas Carlyle61
  103. Thomas Hardy16
  104. Peter Kropotkin14
  105. Alfred Tennyson47
  106. Harriet Beecher Stowe45
  107. Pius X21
  108. Paul Verlaine12
  109. August Strindberg7
  110. Nathaniel Hawthorne52
  111. John Ruskin37
  112. Hendrik Lorentz3
  113. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow49
  114. Alexis de Tocqueville51
  115. Leo XIII46
  116. Pierre-Auguste Renoir15
  117. Georg Cantor11
  118. Charles Babbage65
  119. Edgar Degas22
  120. Andrew Carnegie21

The 120 best known of 210 are listed.