Who Was Alive

Who was alive in 1859?

230 of the people we track were surely alive in 1859. The best known are listed first, with the age each reached that year.

Born in 1859: Arthur Conan Doyle, L. L. Zamenhof, Henri Bergson, Knut Hamsun, Pierre Curie, Wilhelm II, John Dewey and Svante August Arrhenius.

Died in 1859: Alexander von Humboldt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Washington Irving and Klemens von Metternich.

  1. Karl Marx41
  2. Abraham Lincoln50
  3. Leo Tolstoy31
  4. Charles Darwin50
  5. Victor Hugo57
  6. Vincent van Gogh6
  7. Fyodor Dostoyevsky38
  8. Friedrich Nietzsche15
  9. Thomas Edison12
  10. Mark Twain24
  11. Sigmund Freud3
  12. Charles Dickens47
  13. Hans Christian Andersen54
  14. Oscar Wilde5
  15. Otto von Bismarck44
  16. Nikola Tesla3
  17. Louis Pasteur37
  18. Richard Wagner46
  19. Friedrich Engels39
  20. Sarah Bernhardt15
  21. Alfred Nobel26
  22. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky19
  23. Theodore Roosevelt1
  24. Jules Verne31
  25. Woodrow Wilson3
  26. George Bernard Shaw3
  27. Max Planck1
  28. Arthur Conan Doyleborn
  29. Michael Faraday68
  30. Giuseppe Verdi46
  31. Charles Baudelaire38
  32. Dmitri Mendeleev25
  33. Arthur Schopenhauer71
  34. Victoria40
  35. Alexandre Dumas57
  36. Henrik Ibsen31
  37. Émile Zola19
  38. James Clerk Maxwell28
  39. Johannes Brahms26
  40. Anatole France15
  41. Alexander Graham Bell12
  42. Octave Mirbeau11
  43. Gustave Flaubert38
  44. Ulysses S. Grant37
  45. Lewis Carroll27
  46. Wilhelm Röntgen14
  47. Ralph Waldo Emerson56
  48. Claude Monet19
  49. Guy de Maupassant9
  50. Selma Lagerlöf1
  51. Robert Louis Stevenson9
  52. Ivan Turgenev41
  53. John Stuart Mill53
  54. Florence Nightingale39
  55. Antonín Dvořák18
  56. Walt Whitman40
  57. James A. Garfield28
  58. Emily Dickinson29
  59. William Howard Taft2
  60. Giacomo Puccini1
  61. Martin Van Buren77
  62. Grover Cleveland22
  63. Andrew Johnson51
  64. Henry David Thoreau42
  65. James Buchanan68
  66. Arthur Rimbaud5
  67. John Tyler69
  68. Mikhail Bakunin45
  69. William McKinley16
  70. Alexander von Humboldt89 †
  71. Millard Fillmore59
  72. L. L. Zamenhofborn
  73. Franklin Pierce55
  74. Rutherford B. Hayes37
  75. Paul Cézanne20
  76. Henryk Sienkiewicz13
  77. Benjamin Disraeli55
  78. Taras Shevchenko45
  79. George Eliot40
  80. Henri Bergsonborn
  81. George Sand55
  82. Benjamin Harrison26
  83. Hector Berlioz56
  84. James Prescott Joule41
  85. Knut Hamsunborn
  86. Gregor Mendel37
  87. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres79
  88. Paul Gauguin11
  89. Chester A. Arthur30
  90. Giuseppe Garibaldi52
  91. Herman Melville40
  92. Auguste Rodin19
  93. Antoni Gaudí7
  94. Henri Poincaré5
  95. Pierre Curieborn
  96. Wilhelm IIborn
  97. Joseph Conrad2
  98. Napoleon III51
  99. Franz Liszt48
  100. Theodor Mommsen42
  101. Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson27
  102. Robert Koch16
  103. Émile Durkheim1
  104. Frédéric Mistral29
  105. William James17
  106. Ivan Pavlov10
  107. Giosuè Carducci24
  108. Sully Prudhomme20
  109. Eugène Delacroix61
  110. Pius XI2
  111. Herbert Spencer39
  112. Joseph John Thomson3
  113. Thomas Carlyle64
  114. Thomas Hardy19
  115. Peter Kropotkin17
  116. Alfred Tennyson50
  117. Harriet Beecher Stowe48
  118. Pius X24
  119. Paul Verlaine15
  120. August Strindberg10

The 120 best known of 230 are listed.