Who Was Alive

James Watt

British engineer

Born 19 January 1736 · died 25 August 1819, aged 83

Who was alive at the same time as James Watt?

  1. Johann Sebastian Bach
  2. Voltaire
  3. Benjamin Franklin
  4. Carl Linnaeus
  5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  6. Adam Smith
  7. Immanuel Kant
  8. George Washington
  9. James Watt
  10. Thomas Jefferson
  11. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  12. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  13. Ludwig van Beethoven
  14. Napoleon
  15. Lord Byron
  16. Alexander Pushkin
  17. Victor Hugo
  18. Hans Christian Andersen
  19. Edgar Allan Poe
  20. Abraham Lincoln
  21. Charles Darwin
  22. Charles Dickens
  23. Otto von Bismarck
  24. Karl Marx
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 Watt was born, George Washington was 3, Johann Sebastian Bach was 50, Voltaire was 41, Immanuel Kant was 11 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was 23.

When James Watt died, Karl Marx was 1, Abraham Lincoln was 10, Napoleon was 50, Charles Darwin was 10 and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was 69.

Born during James Watt’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 9 years before James Watt was born, Leo Tolstoy was born 9 years after James Watt died, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was born 2 years after James Watt died and Louis Pasteur was born 3 years after James Watt died.

Compare

All 219 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. Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
  13. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  14. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  15. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  16. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
  17. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  18. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  19. Adam Smith 1723 – 1790
  20. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  21. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  22. Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790
  23. Carl Linnaeus 1707 – 1778
  24. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  25. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  26. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  27. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  28. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  29. Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783
  30. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  31. James Cook 1728 – 1779
  32. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  33. Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805
  34. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  35. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  36. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  37. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  38. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  39. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  40. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  41. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  42. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  43. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  44. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  45. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  46. Antonio Vivaldi 1678 – 1741
  47. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  48. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  49. Jonathan Swift 1667 – 1745
  50. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  51. George Frideric Handel 1685 – 1759
  52. Montesquieu 1689 – 1755
  53. David Hume 1711 – 1776
  54. Joseph Haydn 1732 – 1809
  55. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  56. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  57. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  58. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  59. Catherine II of Russia 1729 – 1796
  60. Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784
  61. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  62. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  63. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  64. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  65. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  66. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  67. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  68. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  69. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  70. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  71. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  72. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  73. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  74. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  75. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  76. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  77. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  78. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  79. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  80. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  81. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  82. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  83. Thomas Paine 1737 – 1809
  84. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  85. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  86. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  87. Samuel Johnson 1709 – 1784
  88. Marie Antoinette 1755 – 1793
  89. Maximilien Robespierre 1758 – 1794
  90. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  91. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  92. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  93. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  94. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  95. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  96. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  97. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  98. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  99. Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
  100. Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797
  101. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  102. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  103. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  104. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  105. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  106. Louis XVI of France 1754 – 1793
  107. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  108. Frederick II of Prussia 1712 – 1786
  109. Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797
  110. Robert Burns 1759 – 1796
  111. Felix Mendelssohn 1809 – 1847
  112. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
  113. Alexander Pope 1688 – 1744
  114. Eugène Delacroix 1798 – 1863
  115. André-Marie Ampère 1775 – 1836
  116. Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881
  117. Alfred Tennyson 1809 – 1892
  118. Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811 – 1896
  119. Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
  120. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864
  121. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900
  122. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882
  123. Alexis de Tocqueville 1805 – 1859
  124. Leo XIII 1810 – 1903
  125. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert 1717 – 1783
  126. William Herschel 1738 – 1822
  127. Edward Jenner 1749 – 1823
  128. Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762 – 1814
  129. Novalis 1772 – 1801
  130. Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871
  131. John Dalton 1766 – 1844
  132. Giacomo Leopardi 1798 – 1837
  133. Alexander I of Russia 1777 – 1825
  134. George Berkeley 1685 – 1753
  135. Mikhail Lomonosov 1711 – 1765
  136. Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck 1744 – 1829
  137. Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 – 1872
  138. Washington Irving 1783 – 1859
  139. Alphonse de Lamartine 1790 – 1869
  140. Pius IX 1792 – 1878
  141. George III of Great Britain 1738 – 1820
  142. Carl von Clausewitz 1780 – 1831
  143. Alessandro Manzoni 1785 – 1873
  144. Gioachino Rossini 1792 – 1868
  145. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon 1809 – 1865
  146. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing 1729 – 1781
  147. Joseph Smith 1805 – 1844
  148. Louis XV of France 1710 – 1774
  149. Maria Theresa of Austria 1717 – 1780
  150. Giacomo Casanova 1725 – 1798

The 150 best known are listed.