Mapping time: The surprising overlaps of history’s most influential minds

“Life can only be understood backwards, but must be lived forwards,” Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard noted in his diary in 1843. But it’s not just your own life that’s best understood in the rearview mirror: If you look back on the world’s most famous figures, you may find surprising connections and overlaps that reshape your understanding of history’s timeline.

Co-aliveness that boggles the mind

It’s wise to reserve judgment on important figures until they’re dead. Only when they’ve shuffled off this mortal coil do their legacies begin to slot into neat categories, assuming their full cultural significance.

Yet, those neat categories often obscure as much as they reveal. We look back on famous past lives through the prism of those mostly fictitious compartments — labeling one as a scientist, another as a pirate — as if they were as neatly separated from life’s complexities as they are from us by time.

This graph perforates that temporal prejudice. Called “The Big Map of Who Lived When,” it shows us which historical figures were contemporaries. The co-aliveness of some of these figures may boggle your mind.

The most satisfying way to use this map is to look for long lives with short overlaps. Like a picture of a great-grandparent holding their great-grandchild, there is something poetic about two lives lived so far apart yet intertwining for a brief period.

Take, for example, current U.S. president Joe Biden (°1942), the oldest serving president to date, who for about a year was alive at the same time as Nikola Tesla (1854-1943), the Serbian-American inventor who developed the alternating current (AC) system that is used for distributing electricity.

Here’s another, more recent (and more baffling) overlap: The life of J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), who wrote The Lord of the Rings, coincided ever so slightly with that of Eminem (°1972), voted in 2015 the third-best rapper of all time.

The Age of Cromwell — and Descartes

That sense of wonder flattens somewhat the further you go back in time — all of history becomes “the distant past” after you hit a certain point. Still, it’s illuminating to see that Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Leonardo da Vinci (1452–1519), and Martin Luther (1483–1546) were contemporaries of each other.

Or that the lives of Oliver Cromwell (1599-1658) and René Descartes (1596-1650) synced almost perfectly with each other, despite the one being the dogmatically Puritan figurehead of the English Civil War, and the other the father of modern, rationalist philosophy by giving doubt to a central role in the pursuit of truth.

Also fun: Add a few degrees of separation. For example, Biden and Tesla were contemporaries. And Tesla’s life overlapped for a few years with that of Washington Irving (1783-1859). That means Biden is just one life removed from the writer of Sleepy Hollow and other early American tales.

The map adds a few interesting connections between some of the contemporaries on the map. Ernest Hemingway and Fidel Castro met in 1960. T.S. Eliot and Groucho Marx were friends. Walt Disney and Salvador Dali collaborated in 1946. And Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on the same day: July 4th, 1826.

Also mentioned: Charlie Chaplin parodied Adolf Hitler (in The Great Dictator). Not mentioned: Both were born just four days apart, rose from poverty to world fame, and sported the same toothbrush mustache.

And this perhaps proves that there can indeed be such a thing as too much correspondence. As does this eerie map, illustrating a freak conjunction of place and time. For a brief period in the year preceding the First World War, the Austrian capital Vienna was simultaneously home to Sigmund Freud, the father of psychoanalysis; Adolf Hitler, the future dictator of Germany; Leon Trotsky, Russian revolutionary; Joseph Stalin, the future dictator of the Soviet Union; and Franz Joseph I, the penultimate emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Kierkegaard, Poe, Darwin, and Dickens

As the map shows, they lived quite close to each other and could have met up at a nearby café for what might have been a very interesting kaffeeklatsch. But of course, most of them were as unknown to each other as to the rest of the world. They still had a lot of living to do before history realized, retrospectively, how important they had been.

Kierkegaard’s life was too short and early (1813-1855) to be eligible for membership in this ephemeral Vienna Circle. But he is on the main map, which shows he was a contemporary of Poe, Darwin, and Dickens, among many others. And what does that teach us? Perhaps the man himself would like to offer another of his pithy quotes: “What labels me, negates me.”

Many thanks to Alex Berezow for spotting the main graph, found here on Reddit/DataIsBeautiful. Map by Reddit user profound_whatever.

Strange Maps #1253

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