1889 is the crossroads where the descendants, living persons and ancestors of previous, current and future influencers meet on the chronological timeline of earth’s history. Thinkers and Businessmen  Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger created the free content online encyclopedia Wikipedia which is  mostly quoted directly for all the bio descriptions read in this article.

These guys helped shaped the world in our century by giving everyone easy access to information by creating an online encyclopedia that anyone can access with great ease. From there I found information on those alive in 1889 who shaped the world. Those philosophers who shaped the way we think. Those scientists who shaped science and made it a little more accessible to the common man. Those business people who started businesses that shaped our society in which we work and play in everyday.

These are the individuals I looked at and choose to highlight in this edition of

Notable People Alive In 1889 

Those who helped Shape the World.

And Now…

We Start With

With Those

Born in 1800’s    

Napoleon Conquers & Lewis & Clark Explore The Early 1800’s

Charles Pritchard 
(February 29, 1808 –May 28, 1893)

He was a British astronomer, clergyman, and educational reformer. He founded the Clapham Grammar School in 1834 and included sciences in the curriculum. A chapel was erected in 1846.

Born in 1810’s

Frankenstein’s Silent Night 1810 – 1819

Mary Ellen Pleasant
(August 19, 1814 – January 11, 1904)

She was an American entrepreneur, financier, real estate magnate and abolitionist. She was arguably the first self-made millionaire of African-American heritage, preceding Madam C. J. Walker by decades.

Nursery Rhyme
and Thanksgiving Creator’s Son

Sarah Josepha Hale
(October 24, 1788 – April 30, 1879)

She was an American writer, activist, and editor of the most widely circulated magazine in the period before the Civil War, Godey’s Lady’s Book.  She was the author of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb“. Hale famously campaigned for the creation of the American holiday known as Thanksgiving, and for the completion of the Bunker Hill Monument.

She was the Mother of

Horatio Hale
(May 3, 1817 – December 28, 1896)

He  was an American-Canadian ethnologist, philologist and businessman. He is known for his study of languages as a key for classifying ancient peoples and being able to trace their migrations. Hale was the first to analyze and confirm that the Tutelo language of some Virginia Native Americans belonged to the Siouan family, which was most associated with the western Dakota and Hidatsa languages.

Hale also determined that the Cherokee language spoken by a tribe associated with the Appalachian Mountains and upland areas of the interior American Southeast was one of the Iroquoian family of languages.  Most of the speakers of the latter had historically occupied territory to the east and south of the Great Lakes, in present-day New York and Pennsylvania. In addition, he published a work, Iroquois Book of Rites (1883), based on his translation of their only two known historic manuscripts. It was supported by his studies with tribal elders in interpreting the Iroquois wampum belts to establish the people’s prehistory.

Born in 1820’s

The Mormon Saturday Evening Post Arrives in the 1820s

William Thomson, 1st Baron Lord Kelvin  
OM,  GCVO,  PC,  FRS, FRSE
(June 26, 1824 – 17 December 17, 1907)

He gives a lecture where he becomes the first scientist to formulate the hypothetical concept of dark matter; he then attempted to define and locate some “dark bodies” in the Milky Way. (Dark Matter, Dark Energy

Jane Elizabeth Lathrop Stanford 
(August 25, 1828 – February 28, 1905)

She was an American philanthropist and co-founder of Stanford University in 1885 (opened 1891), along with her husband, Leland Stanford, in memory of their only child, Leland Stanford Jr., who died of typhoid fever at age 15 in 1884. After her husband’s death in 1893, she funded and operated the university almost single-handedly until her unsolved murder by strychnine poisoning in 1905.

She was the eighth First Lady of California. Her husband served as governor from January 10, 1862 to December 10, 1863.

Born in 1830’s

Mark Twain and the Wellerman Come on a Comet – 1830 – 1839

Mary Everest Boole 
(March 11, 1832 – May 17, 1916 )

She was a self-taught mathematician who is best known as an author of didactic works on mathematics, such as Philosophy and Fun of Algebra, and as the wife of fellow mathematician George Boole (November 2, 1815 – December 8, 1864). Her progressive ideas on education, as expounded in The Preparation of the Child for Science, included encouraging children to explore mathematics through playful activities such as curve stitching. Her life is of interest to feminists as an example of how women made careers in an academic system that did not welcome them.

Hetty Green 
(November 21, 1834 – July 3, 1916)

She was an American businesswoman and financier known as “the richest woman in America” during the Gilded Age. Those who knew her well referred to her admiringly as the “Queen of Wall Street” due to her willingness to lend freely and at reasonable interest rates to financiers and city governments during financial panics. Her extraordinary discipline during such times enabled her to amass a fortune as a financier at a time when nearly all major financiers were men.

As a highly successful investor, with a Wall Street office, she was unusual for being a woman in a man’s world. Unwilling to participate in New York City high society, conspicuous consumption, or business partnerships, she may have been eccentric and curt with the press but she was a pioneer of value investing. Her willingness to make low-rate loans (with her well-tended reserves of currency) in place of the failing banks during the Panic of 1907 helped bail out Wall Street, New York City, and the United States economy. Nonetheless, she was seen in her widowhood as an odd miser all in black, sometimes referred to sensationally as the “Witch of Wall Street“, and later the Guinness Book of World Records even named her the “greatest miser,” for a time. Stories that were often cited include her refusal to buy expensive clothes or pay for hot water, and her habit of wearing a single dress that was replaced only when it was worn out. Later evaluations have seen her as perhaps eccentric, but mostly out-of-step with the excesses of the Gilded Age wealthy, and the contemporary expectations for women, especially of her class.

 Andrew Carnegie,
(November 25, 1835 – August 11, 1919)

He was a Scottish-American industrialist and philanthropist. Carnegie led the expansion of the American steel industry in the late 19th century and became one of the richest Americans in history.

He became a leading philanthropist in the United States, Great Britain, and the British Empire. During the last 18 years of his life, he gave away around $350 million (roughly $6.5 billion in 2023), almost 90 percent of his fortune, to charities, foundations and universities. His 1889 article proclaiming “The Gospel of Wealth” called on the rich to use their wealth to improve society, expressed support for progressive taxation and an estate tax, and stimulated a wave of philanthropy.

J.P. Morgan,
(April 17, 1837 – March 31, 1913)

He was an American financier and investment banker who dominated corporate finance on Wall Street throughout the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. As the head of the banking firm that ultimately became known as J.P. Morgan and Co., he was a driving force behind the wave of industrial consolidations in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century.

John D. Rockefeller,
(July 8, 1839 – May 23, 1937)

He was an American business magnate and philanthropist. He was one of the wealthiest Americans of all time and one of the richest people in modern history.

 

Born in 1840’s

The Longest Pope at La Salette -1840’s

William James
(January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910)

He was an American philosopher and psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States.  James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the “Father of American psychology.

Cornelius Vanderbilt II 
(November 27, 1843 – September 12, 1899)

He  was an American socialite and a member of the prominent United States Vanderbilt family.

Friedrich Nietzsche
(October 15, 1844 –  August 25, 1900)

He was a German classical scholar, philosopher, and critic of culture, who became one of the most influential of all modern thinkers.

Ivan Pavlov 
(September 26, 1849 – February 27, 1936)

He was a Russian and Soviet experimental neurologist and physiologist known for his discovery of classical conditioning through his experiments with dogs.

Born in 1850’s

Stop and Pray the Angelus between 1850 – 1859

Émile Roux   FRS
(December 17, 1853 –  November 3, 1933)

He was a French physician, bacteriologist and immunologist. Roux was one of the closest collaborators of Louis Pasteur (1822–1895), a co-founder of the Pasteur Institute, and responsible for the institute’s production of the anti-diphtheria serum, the first effective therapy for this disease. Additionally, he investigated cholera, chicken-cholera, rabies, and tuberculosis. Roux is regarded as a founder of the field of immunology.

  Karl Marx’s Daughters

Karl Marx
(May 5, 1818 –   March 14, 1883)

He was a German-born philosopher, political theorist, economist, historian, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His best-known works are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto (with Friedrich Engels) and his three-volume Das Kapital (1867–1894); the latter employs his critical approach of historical materialism in an analysis of capitalism, in the culmination of his intellectual endeavours. Marx’s ideas and their subsequent development, collectively known as Marxism, have had enormous influence on modern intellectual, economic and political history.

Along with his wife
Jenny von Westphalen 
(February 12, 1814 –  December 2,1881)

They were the parents of 7 kids
including

Jenny Longuet 
(May 1, 1844 –   January 11, 1883)

She was the eldest daughter of Marxes. Briefly a political journalist writing under the pen name J. Williams, Longuet taught language classes and had a family of five sons and a daughter before her death to cancer at the age of 38.

Laura Marx 
(September 26, 1845 – November 25, 1911)

She was a socialist activist. The second daughter of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen, she married revolutionary writer Paul Lafargue in 1868. The two committed suicide together in 1911.

Jenny Julia Eleanor Marx
(January 16, 1855 –March 31, 1898)

Sometimes called Eleanor Aveling and known to her family as Tussy, was the English-born youngest daughter of Karl Marx. She was herself a socialist activist who sometimes worked as a literary translator. In March 1898, after discovering that her partner Edward Aveling had secretly married the previous year, she poisoned herself at the age of 43.

In 1884, Marx met Clementina Black, a painter and trade unionist, and became involved in the Women’s Trade Union League. She would go on to support numerous strikes, including the Bryant & May strike of 1888 and the London Dock Strike of 1889. She spoke to the Silvertown strikers at an open meeting in November 1889, alongside her friends Edith Ellis and Honor Brooke. She helped organise the Gasworkers’ Union and wrote numerous books and articles.

In 1885, she helped organise the International Socialist Congress in Paris. The following year, she toured the United States, along with Aveling and the German socialist Wilhelm Liebknecht, raising money for the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Teixeira Mendes 
(January 5, 1855 –  June 28, 1927)

He was a Brazilian philosopher and mathematician. He is credited with creating the national motto, “Order and Progress”, as well as the national flag on which it appears.

Teixeira Mendes was heavily influenced by Comtism and is classed as a “Humanity Apostle” by Brazil’s Religion of Humanity, which is called “Igreja Positivista do Brasil” or in English “Positivist Church of Brazil.” In life he led the Positivist Church after 1903. For him the Positivist viewpoint meant he opposed most wars and believed in the eventual disappearance of nations. He also opposed Christian missionary work toward the indigenous Brazilians and instead favored a policy based on protection and gradual assimilation. He deemed their societies “fetishistic”, but believed a gradual non-coercive assimilation was the way to turn them into Positivists.

John Nash’s Family Tree

Sigmund Freud
(May 6, 1856 –September 23, 1939)

He was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for evaluating and treating pathologies seen as originating from conflicts in the psyche, through dialogue between patient and psychoanalyst, and the distinctive theory of mind and human agency derived from it.

In 1889 Sigmund Freud Traveled to Nancy, France, to study Hippolyte Bernheim’s hypnotic techniques

Martin Freud, a lawyer and the eldest son of Sigmund Freud, was born on December 6, 1889, in Vienna, and died in 1967 in London.

Booker T. Washington
(April 5, 1856 – November 14, 1915)

He was an American educator, author, and orator. Between 1890 and 1915, Washington was the primary leader in the African-American community and of the contemporary Black elite.

Alfred Binet
(July 8, 1857 –  October 18, 1911)

He  was a French psychologist who together with Théodore Simon invented the first practical intelligence test, the Binet–Simon test.

Charles Eastman
(February 19, 1858 – January 8, 1939,

He  was an American physician, writer, and social reformer. He was among the first Native Americans to be certified in Western medicine and was “one of the most prolific authors and speakers on Sioux ethnohistory and American Indian affairs” in the early 20th century.

Eastman was of Santee Dakota, English and French ancestry. After working as a physician on reservations in South Dakota, he became increasingly active in politics and issues on Native American rights. He worked to improve the lives of youths: he founded thirty-two Native American chapters of the YMCA and helped to found the Boy Scouts of America. He was an early Native American historian.

Max Planck – Wikipedia 23 April 1858 – 4 October 1947) was a German theoretical physicist whose discovery of energy quanta won him the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918.

Born in 1860’s

The Civil War Years in Wonderland- 1860 – 1869

Victor Frankl’s Parents

Geni – Gabriel Frankl (1861-1943
+  Elsa Frankl (Lion) (1879-1944)

= Viktor Frankl 

 (March 26, 1905 –  September 2, 1997) was an Austrian neurologist, psychologist, philosopher, and Holocaust survivor, who founded logotherapy, a school of psychotherapy that describes a search for a life’s meaning as the central human motivational force.  Logotherapy is part of existential and humanistic psychology theories.

Logotherapy was promoted as the third school of Viennese Psychotherapy, after those established by Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler.

Frankl published 39 books. The autobiographical Man’s Search for Meaning, a best-selling book, is based on his experiences in various Nazi concentration camps. 

William Randolph Hearst
(April 29, 1863 – August 14, 1951)

He was an American newspaper publisher and politician who developed the nation’s largest newspaper chain and media company, Hearst Communications. His flamboyant methods of yellow journalism influenced the nation’s popular media by emphasizing sensationalism and human-interest stories. Hearst entered the publishing business in 1887 with Mitchell Trubitt after being given control of The San Francisco Examiner by his wealthy father, Senator George Hearst.

George Washington Carver
(c. 1864 – January 5, 1943)

He was an American agricultural scientist and inventor who promoted alternative crops to cotton and methods to prevent soil depletion. He was one of the most prominent black scientists of the early 20th century.

John Jacob Astor IV
(July 13, 1864 – April 15, 1912)

He was an American business magnate, real estate developer, investor, writer, lieutenant colonel in the Spanish–American War, and a prominent member of the Astor family. He was among the most prominent American passengers aboard RMS Titanic and perished along with 1,495 others when the ship sank on her maiden voyage. Astor was the richest passenger aboard the RMS Titanic and was thought to be among the richest people in the world at that time, with a net worth of roughly $87 million (equivalent to $2.75 billion in 2023) when he died.

The money in his bank account was enough to build 30 Titanics. However, faced with mortal danger, he chose what he deemed morally right and gave up his spot in a lifeboat to save two frightened children. Love Sweets life Old Historical Photos 2.0

 

Anne Sullivan,
(April 14, 1866 – October 20, 1936)

She was an American teacher best known for being the instructor and lifelong companion of Helen Keller.

At the age of five, Sullivan contracted trachoma, an eye disease, which left her partially blind and without reading or writing skills. She received her education as a student of the Perkins School for the Blind. Soon after graduation at age 20, she became a teacher to Keller

 

Madam C. J. Walker 
(December 23, 1867 – May 25, 1919)

She was an American entrepreneur, philanthropist, and political and social activist. She is recorded as the first female self-made millionaire in America in the Guinness Book of World Records. Multiple sources mention that although other women (like Mary Ellen Pleasant) might have been the first, their wealth is not as well-documented.

Born in 1870’s

The Post Civil War Years – 1870 – 1879

Alfred Adler
(February 7, 1870 – May 28, 1937)

He was an Austrian medical doctor, psychotherapist, and founder of the school of individual psychology.  His emphasis on the importance of feelings of belonging, relationships within the family, and birth order set him apart from Freud and others in their common circle. He proposed that contributing to others (social interest or Gemeinschaftsgefühl) was how the individual feels a sense of worth and belonging in the family and society. His earlier work focused on inferiority, coining the term inferiority complex, an isolating element which he argued plays a key role in personality development. Alfred Adler considered a human being as an individual whole, and therefore he called his school of psychology “Individual Psychology”.

Adler was the first to emphasize the importance of the social element in the re-adjustment process of the individual and to carry psychiatry into the community.  A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Adler as the 67th most eminent psychologist of the 20th century.

Elon Musk Family Tree

John Elon Haldeman (1871-1909)
+ Joshua Norman Haldeman D.C. (1902-1974)  

= Maye Musk 
(born April 19, 1948)

She is a model and dietitian. She has been a model for 50 years, appearing on the covers of magazines, including a Time magazine health edition, Women’s Day, international editions of Vogue, and Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. She is the mother of Elon Musk, Kimbal Musk and Tosca Musk.^[5] She holds Canadian, South African, and American citizenship. She is a registered dietitian. She is also the mother of 

Elon Musk 
born June 28, 1971)

He is a businessman and investor known for his key roles in the space company SpaceX and the automotive company Tesla, Inc. Other involvements include ownership of X Corp., the company that operates the social media platform X (formerly known as Twitter), and his role in the founding of the Boring Company, xAI, Neuralink, and OpenAI. He is one of the wealthiest individuals in the world; as of August 2024 Forbes estimates his net worth to be US$247 billion.

Bertrand Russell 
(May 18, 1872 –  February 2, 1970)

He was a British mathematician, logician, philosopher, and public intellectual. He had influence on mathematics, logic, set theory, and various areas of analytic philosophy.

Russell described himself in 1947 as an agnostic or an atheist: he found it difficult to determine which term to adopt, saying:

Therefore, in regard to the Olympic gods, speaking to a purely philosophical audience, I would say that I am an Agnostic. But speaking popularly, I think that all of us would say in regard to those gods that we were Atheists. In regard to the Christian God, I should, I think, take exactly the same line. 

For most of his adult life, Russell maintained religion to be little more than superstition and, despite any positive effects, largely harmful to people. He believed that religion and the religious outlook serve to impede knowledge and foster fear and dependency, and to be responsible for much of our world’s wars, oppression, and misery. He was a member of the advisory council of the British Humanist Association^[156] and the president of Cardiff Humanists until his death.

Dr. Spock’s Parents

Benjamin Ives Spock (1872-1931) 
+ Mildred Louise (Stoughton) Spock (1876-1968)

Benjamin Spock
(May 2, 1903 – March 15, 1998)

He was an American pediatrician  and left-wing political activist. His book Baby and Child Care (1946) is one of the best-selling books of the 20th century, selling 500,000 copies in the six months after its initial publication and 50 million by the time of Spock’s death in 1998. The book’s premise told mothers, “You know more than you think you do.” Dr. Spock was widely regarded as a trusted source for parenting advice in his generation.

Spock was the first pediatrician to study psychoanalysis in an effort to understand children’s needs and family dynamics. His ideas influenced several generations of parents, encouraging them to be more flexible and affectionate with their children and to treat them as individuals. However, his theories were widely criticized by colleagues for relying heavily on anecdotal evidence rather than serious academic research. 

After undergoing a self-described “conversion to socialism“, Spock became an activist in the New Left and anti-Vietnam War movements during the ’60s and early ’70s, culminating in his run for President of the United States as the People’s Party nominee in 1972. He campaigned on a maximum wage, legalized abortion, and withdrawing troops from all foreign countries. His books were criticized by conservatives for propagating permissiveness and an expectation of instant gratification, a charge that Spock denied.

Théodore Simon
(July 10, 1873 –  September 4, 1961)

He was a French psychiatrist who worked with Alfred Binet to develop the Binet-Simon Intelligence Test, one of the most widely used scales in the world for measuring intelligence.

Stephen Hawking Family Tree

Robert Hawking (1873-1951)
+ Frank Hawking (1905-1986) 

Stephen Hawking
(8 January 1942 – 14 March 2018)

He was an English theoretical physicist, cosmologist, and author who was director of research at the Centre for Theoretical Cosmology at the University of Cambridge. Between 1979 and 2009, he was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge, widely viewed as one of the most prestigious academic posts in the world.

Carl Jung
(July 26, 1875 – June 6, 1961)

He was a Swiss psychiatrist, psychotherapist, psychologist and pioneering evolutionary theorist who founded the school of analytical psychology. He was a prolific author, illustrator, and correspondent, and a complex and controversial character, perhaps best known through his “autobiography” Memories, Dreams, Reflections.

 Jung’s work has been influential in the fields of psychiatry, anthropology, archaeology, literature, philosophy, psychology, religious studies and evolutionary theory.

Carter G. Woodson
(December 19, 1875 – April 3, 1950)

He was an American historian, author, journalist, and the founder of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). He was one of the first scholars to study the history of the African diaspora, including African-American history. A founder of The Journal of Negro History in 1916, Woodson has been called the “father of black history.” In February 1926, he launched the celebration of “Negro History Week,” the precursor of Black History Month. Woodson was an important figure to the movement of Afrocentrism, due to his perspective of placing people of African descent at the center of the study of history and the human experience.

Alfred Gwynne Vanderbilt
(1877–1915),

He was an American businessman and member of the Vanderbilt family. A sportsman, he participated in and pioneered a number of related endeavors. He died in the sinking of the RMS Lusitania.

Albert Einstein
(March 14, 1879 –  April 18, 1955)

He was a German-born theoretical physicist who is widely held as one of the most influential scientists. Best known for developing the theory of relativity, Einstein also made important contributions to quantum mechanics.  His mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc², which arises from relativity theory, has been called “the world’s most famous equation”. He received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics “for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect“, a pivotal step in the development of quantum theory. His intellectual achievements and originality have made the word Einstein broadly synonymous with genius.

 In 1889 10 year old Albert Einstein attended the Munich academic secondary school till 1894. A book called The Physicist and the Philosopher: Einstein, Bergson, and the Debate That Changed Our Understanding of Time  by Jimena Canales was published on May 26, 2015.

Born in 1880’s

1st Electric Circus Garden Outlaws – 1880 – 1888

Robert R. McCormick
(July 30, 1880 – April 1, 1955)

He was an American lawyer, businessman and anti-war activist.

A member of the McCormick family of Chicago, McCormick became a lawyer, Republican Chicago alderman, distinguished U.S. Army officer in World War I, and eventually owner and publisher of the Chicago Tribune newspaper. A leading Republican and isolationist; McCormick opposed the increase in federal power brought about by the New Deal and later opposed American entry into World War II. His legacy includes what is now the McCormick Foundation philanthropic organization.

Emmy Noether 
(March 23, 1882 – April 14, 1935)

She was a German mathematician who made many important contributions to abstract algebra. She proved Noether’s first and second theorems, which are fundamental in mathematical physics. She was described by Albert Einstein, as the most important woman in the history of mathematics. As one of the leading mathematicians of her time, she developed theories of rings, fields, and algebras. In physics, Noether’s theorem explains the connection between symmetry and conservation laws.

Leonie von Meusebach–Zesch
(November 27, 1882 – July 7, 1944)

She was an American early 20th-century pioneer female dentist who practiced in Texas, Alaska, Arizona and California. She is also known as Leonie von Zesch or Leonie Zesch. She was inducted into the Alaska Women’s Hall of Fame in 2012.

 

 

1885

While Marty and Doc Traveled Through Time This Also Happened

John Edensor Littlewood
(June 9, 1885 –September 6, 1977)

He was a British mathematician who worked on topics relating to analysis, number theory, and differential equations,

Erwin Schrödinger
(August 2, 1887 –  January 4, 1961)

He was a Nobel Prize–winning Austrian and naturalized Irish physicist who developed fundamental results in quantum theory. In particular, he is recognized for postulating the Schrödinger equation, an equation that provides a way to calculate the wave function of a system and how it changes dynamically in time. He coined the term “quantum entanglement“,^[4][5][6] and was the earliest to discuss it, doing so in 1932.

Saints and other Catholics Alive and Well in 1889

Descendants of Popes and Presidents Alive in 1889

Ancestors of Popes and Presidents Alive in 1889

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Catholic Bard’s Guide To History Timeline Of Articles |
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1889