Who Was Alive

James Clerk Maxwell

Scottish physicist

Born 13 June 1831 · died 5 November 1879, aged 48

Who was alive at the same time as James Clerk Maxwell?

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 James Clerk Maxwell was born, Karl Marx was 13, Abraham Lincoln was 22, Leo Tolstoy was 2, Charles Darwin was 22 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 81.

When James Clerk Maxwell died, Albert Einstein was under a year old, Karl Marx was 61, Vladimir Lenin was 9, Mahatma Gandhi was 10 and Leo Tolstoy was 51.

Born during James Clerk Maxwell’s lifetime: Albert Einstein, Vladimir Lenin, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin, Vincent van Gogh, Winston Churchill, Friedrich Nietzsche and Thomas Edison.

Not quite contemporaries: Adolf Hitler was born 10 years after James Clerk Maxwell died, Napoleon died 10 years before James Clerk Maxwell was born, Ludwig van Beethoven died 4 years before James Clerk Maxwell was born and Pablo Picasso was born 2 years after James Clerk Maxwell died.

Compare

All 388 contemporaries we track

  1. Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
  2. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  3. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  4. Vladimir Lenin 1870 – 1924
  5. Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948
  6. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  7. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  8. Joseph Stalin 1878 – 1953
  9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 1749 – 1832
  10. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  11. Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
  12. Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965
  13. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  14. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  15. Thomas Edison 1847 – 1931
  16. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  17. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  18. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  19. Marie Curie 1867 – 1934
  20. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  21. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  22. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  23. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  24. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  25. Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
  26. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  27. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  28. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  29. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  30. Henry Ford 1863 – 1947
  31. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  32. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  33. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  34. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  35. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  36. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  37. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  38. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  39. Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922
  40. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  41. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  42. Rosa Luxemburg 1871 – 1919
  43. Roald Amundsen 1872 – c. 1928
  44. Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
  45. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  46. Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970
  47. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  48. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  49. Maxim Gorky 1868 – 1936
  50. Henri Matisse 1869 – 1954
  51. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  52. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  53. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  54. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  55. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 – 1959
  56. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  57. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  58. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  59. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  60. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  61. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  62. Ernest Rutherford 1871 – 1937
  63. Max Weber 1864 – 1920
  64. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  65. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  66. H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946
  67. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  68. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  69. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  70. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  71. David Hilbert 1862 – 1943
  72. Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955
  73. Herbert Hoover 1874 – 1964
  74. Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962
  75. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  76. Anatole France 1844 – 1924
  77. Alexander Graham Bell 1847 – 1922
  78. Octave Mirbeau 1848 – 1917
  79. Calvin Coolidge 1872 – 1933
  80. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  81. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  82. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  83. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  84. Lewis Carroll 1832 – 1898
  85. Wilhelm Röntgen 1845 – 1923
  86. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  87. Claude Monet 1840 – 1926
  88. Guy de Maupassant 1850 – 1893
  89. Selma Lagerlöf 1858 – 1940
  90. Robert Louis Stevenson 1850 – 1894
  91. William Butler Yeats 1865 – 1939
  92. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  93. Sun Yat-sen 1866 – 1925
  94. Carl Jung 1875 – 1961
  95. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  96. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  97. Antonín Dvořák 1841 – 1904
  98. Gustav Mahler 1860 – 1911
  99. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  100. James A. Garfield 1831 – 1881
  101. Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
  102. William Howard Taft 1857 – 1930
  103. Giacomo Puccini 1858 – 1924
  104. Konrad Adenauer 1876 – 1967
  105. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  106. Grover Cleveland 1837 – 1908
  107. Jack London 1876 – 1916
  108. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  109. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  110. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  111. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  112. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  113. Arthur Rimbaud 1854 – 1891
  114. André Gide 1869 – 1951
  115. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  116. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  117. William McKinley 1843 – 1901
  118. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  119. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  120. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  121. L. L. Zamenhof 1859 – 1917
  122. Warren G. Harding 1865 – 1923
  123. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  124. Romain Rolland 1866 – 1944
  125. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  126. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  127. Rutherford B. Hayes 1822 – 1893
  128. Paul Cézanne 1839 – 1906
  129. Henryk Sienkiewicz 1846 – 1916
  130. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  131. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  132. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  133. Henri Bergson 1859 – 1941
  134. Swami Vivekananda 1863 – 1902
  135. Nicholas II of Russia 1868 – 1918
  136. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  137. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  138. Benjamin Harrison 1833 – 1901
  139. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  140. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  141. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  142. Knut Hamsun 1859 – 1952
  143. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  144. Luigi Pirandello 1867 – 1936
  145. Rainer Maria Rilke 1875 – 1926
  146. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  147. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  148. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  149. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  150. Paul Gauguin 1848 – 1903

The 150 best known are listed.