We could call the time in which we live the “Information Age.” Or we could describe it more vividly as the era of Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart, Beyoncé and Bob Dylan. Whatever you think of the work of any of these figures in particular, you can hardly deny the impact they’ve had on our culture. Were we living a century ago, we might have said the same of Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald (though he hadn’t quite published The Great Gatsby yet), Pablo Picasso and Charlie Chaplin, Marie Curie and Sigmund Freud.
Were we living in the year 1225, our lives would’ve overlapped with those of Leonardo Fibonacci, Francis of Assisi, Rumi, and Thomas Aquinas, as well as both Genghis Khan and his grandson Kublai Khan.
All this is laid out visually in The Big Map of Who Lived When, created earlier this year by a Reddit user called Profound_Whatever. As Big Think’s Frank Jacobs writes, the map reveals surprising instances of contemporaneousness, such as that current U.S. President Joe Biden “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.”
For “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.” Going farther into the past, how many of us were fully aware 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”?
The Big Map of Who Lived When uses a color-coding system to divide the figures whose lifespans it charts into eight categories, including artists (Leonardo da Vinci, Rube Goldberg), thinkers (John Locke, Charles Darwin), “business & industry” (including famed pirates from Henry Morgan to Blackbeard), and “leaders & baddies” (Napoleon, Adolf Hitler). It all reminds us that we’d give anything for a chance to meet some of them, or to stay out of the path of others. Of course, the individuals we think of as having defined a particular historical era weren’t always regarded that way by everyone else who lived at the same time: something it wouldn’t hurt to bear in mind when considering our own place in history.
Related content:
5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History
4000 Years of History Displayed in a 5‑Foot-Long “Histomap” (Early Infographic) From 1931
180,000 Years of Religion Charted on a “Histomap” in 1943
10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931
The History of the World in One Video: Every Year from 200,000 BCE to Today
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
