Who Was Alive

Thomas Edison

American inventor and businessman

Born 11 February 1847 · died 18 October 1931, aged 84

Who was alive at the same time as Thomas Edison?

  1. Victor Hugo
  2. Abraham Lincoln
  3. Charles Darwin
  4. Charles Dickens
  5. Karl Marx
  6. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  7. Leo Tolstoy
  8. Mark Twain
  9. Friedrich Nietzsche
  10. Thomas Edison
  11. Vincent van Gogh
  12. Sigmund Freud
  13. Mahatma Gandhi
  14. Vladimir Lenin
  15. Winston Churchill
  16. Joseph Stalin
  17. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk
  18. Albert Einstein
  19. Pablo Picasso
  20. Charlie Chaplin
  21. Adolf Hitler
  22. Ronald Reagan
  23. Nelson Mandela
  24. Elizabeth II
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 Thomas Edison was born, Karl Marx was 28, Abraham Lincoln was 37, Leo Tolstoy was 18, Charles Darwin was 37 and Victor Hugo was 44.

When Thomas Edison died, Adolf Hitler was 42, Albert Einstein was 52, Ronald Reagan was 20, Nelson Mandela was 13 and Mahatma Gandhi was 62.

Born during Thomas Edison’s lifetime: Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Ronald Reagan, Vladimir Lenin, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Joseph Stalin and Vincent van Gogh.

Not quite contemporaries: Donald Trump was born 15 years after Thomas Edison died, George W. Bush was born 15 years after Thomas Edison died, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died 15 years before Thomas Edison was born and Joe Biden was born 11 years after Thomas Edison died.

Compare

All 825 contemporaries we track

  1. Adolf Hitler 1889 – 1945
  2. Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955
  3. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  4. Ronald Reagan 1911 – 2004
  5. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  6. Vladimir Lenin 1870 – 1924
  7. Nelson Mandela 1918 – 2013
  8. Mahatma Gandhi 1869 – 1948
  9. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  10. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  11. Joseph Stalin 1878 – 1953
  12. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  13. Vincent van Gogh 1853 – 1890
  14. Pablo Picasso 1881 – 1973
  15. Winston Churchill 1874 – 1965
  16. Charlie Chaplin 1889 – 1977
  17. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  18. Friedrich Nietzsche 1844 – 1900
  19. Elizabeth II 1926 – 2022
  20. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk 1879–1881 – 1938
  21. Mark Twain 1835 – 1910
  22. Sigmund Freud 1856 – 1939
  23. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  24. John F. Kennedy 1917 – 1963
  25. Marie Curie 1867 – 1934
  26. Martin Luther King Jr. 1929 – 1968
  27. Salvador Dalí 1904 – 1989
  28. Rabindranath Tagore 1861 – 1941
  29. Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882 – 1945
  30. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  31. Franz Kafka 1883 – 1924
  32. Anton Chekhov 1860 – 1904
  33. Marilyn Monroe 1926 – 1962
  34. Mao Zedong 1893 – 1976
  35. Che Guevara 1928 – 1967
  36. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  37. Oscar Wilde 1854 – 1900
  38. Charles de Gaulle 1890 – 1970
  39. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  40. Nikola Tesla 1856 – 1943
  41. Neil Armstrong 1930 – 2012
  42. Walt Disney 1901 – 1966
  43. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  44. George Orwell 1903 – 1950
  45. Ernest Hemingway 1899 – 1961
  46. Margaret Thatcher 1925 – 2013
  47. James Joyce 1882 – 1941
  48. John Paul II 1920 – 2005
  49. Gabriel García Márquez 1927 – 2014
  50. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  51. Fidel Castro 1926 – 2016
  52. J. R. R. Tolkien 1892 – 1973
  53. Albert Camus 1913 – 1960
  54. Henry Ford 1863 – 1947
  55. Marlene Dietrich 1901 – 1992
  56. Mikhail Gorbachev 1931 – 2022
  57. Benito Mussolini 1883 – 1945
  58. Jean-Paul Sartre 1905 – 1980
  59. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  60. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  61. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  62. Le Corbusier 1887 – 1965
  63. Frida Kahlo 1907 – 1954
  64. Mother Teresa 1910 – 1997
  65. Jimmy Carter 1924 – 2024
  66. Benedict XVI 1927 – 2022
  67. Harry S. Truman 1884 – 1972
  68. Agatha Christie 1890 – 1976
  69. George H. W. Bush 1924 – 2018
  70. Jorge Luis Borges 1899 – 1986
  71. Sarah Bernhardt 1844 – 1923
  72. Alfred Nobel 1833 – 1896
  73. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky 1840 – 1893
  74. Theodore Roosevelt 1858 – 1919
  75. Jawaharlal Nehru 1889 – 1964
  76. Marcel Proust 1871 – 1922
  77. Dwight D. Eisenhower 1890 – 1969
  78. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  79. Woodrow Wilson 1856 – 1924
  80. Rosa Luxemburg 1871 – 1919
  81. Roald Amundsen 1872 – c. 1928
  82. Alan Turing 1912 – 1954
  83. Richard Nixon 1913 – 1994
  84. Rudyard Kipling 1865 – 1936
  85. Alfred Hitchcock 1899 – 1980
  86. Noam Chomsky born 1928
  87. Simone de Beauvoir 1908 – 1986
  88. George Bernard Shaw 1856 – 1950
  89. John Maynard Keynes 1883 – 1946
  90. Niels Bohr 1885 – 1962
  91. Bertrand Russell 1872 – 1970
  92. Leon Trotsky 1879 – 1940
  93. Max Planck 1858 – 1947
  94. Arthur Conan Doyle 1859 – 1930
  95. Maxim Gorky 1868 – 1936
  96. Henri Matisse 1869 – 1954
  97. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  98. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  99. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  100. Dmitri Mendeleev 1834 – 1907
  101. Frank Lloyd Wright 1867 – 1959
  102. Andy Warhol 1928 – 1987
  103. Louis Armstrong 1901 – 1971
  104. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  105. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  106. Virginia Woolf 1882 – 1941
  107. Akira Kurosawa 1910 – 1998
  108. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  109. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  110. Lyndon B. Johnson 1908 – 1973
  111. Gerald Ford 1913 – 2006
  112. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  113. Ernest Rutherford 1871 – 1937
  114. Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889 – 1951
  115. Indira Gandhi 1917 – 1984
  116. Max Weber 1864 – 1920
  117. Huang Xianfan 1899 – 1982
  118. Enrico Fermi 1901 – 1954
  119. Naguib Mahfouz 1911 – 2006
  120. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  121. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  122. Nikita Khrushchev 1894 – 1971
  123. Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 1900 – 1944
  124. Anne Frank 1929 – 1945
  125. H. G. Wells 1866 – 1946
  126. Helen Keller 1880 – 1968
  127. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  128. Pablo Neruda 1904 – 1973
  129. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  130. Émile Zola 1840 – 1902
  131. Igor Stravinsky 1882 – 1971
  132. David Hilbert 1862 – 1943
  133. Thomas Mann 1875 – 1955
  134. Erwin Schrödinger 1887 – 1961
  135. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  136. Herbert Hoover 1874 – 1964
  137. Hermann Hesse 1877 – 1962
  138. Isaac Asimov 1919–1920 – 1992
  139. Ingmar Bergman 1918 – 2007
  140. Federico Fellini 1920 – 1993
  141. Mahathir Mohamad born 1925
  142. Johannes Brahms 1833 – 1897
  143. Anatole France 1844 – 1924
  144. Alexander Graham Bell 1847 – 1922
  145. Octave Mirbeau 1848 – 1917
  146. Calvin Coolidge 1872 – 1933
  147. Boris Yeltsin 1931 – 2007
  148. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  149. Kim Il-sung 1912 – 1994
  150. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn 1918 – 2008

The 150 best known are listed.