Historical figures who were alive at the same time
People are filed in history by what they are known for, and that puts contemporaries in different drawers. Lincoln goes with the Civil War, Darwin with Victorian science, so it is a surprise that they were born on the same day. These are some of the best documented overlaps, with the dates that make them work.
The overlaps at a glance
| WHO | THE LINK |
|---|---|
| Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin | Born on the same day, 12 February 1809 |
| Galileo and Isaac Newton | Galileo died in 1642, Newton was born at the end of it |
| Shakespeare and Cervantes | Both dated 23 April 1616, ten days apart |
| Billy the Kid and Pablo Picasso | Picasso born three months after Billy was shot |
| Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi | Wrote to each other in 1909 and 1910 |
| Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky, Tito and Freud | All in Vienna in 1913 |
| Elizabeth II and Marilyn Monroe | Born six weeks apart in 1926 |
| Anne Frank, Martin Luther King Jr. and Audrey Hepburn | All born in 1929 |
Lincoln and Darwin: the same birthday
Abraham Lincoln was born on the Kentucky frontier and Charles Darwin into a comfortable family in Shrewsbury, England, both on 12 February 1809. Their bicentenary fell on the same day in 2009.
Galileo and Newton: one calendar or two
Galileo died on 8 January 1642. Isaac Newton was born on 25 December 1642, so the two are often said to share a year. The catch is that Italy had switched to the Gregorian calendar and England had not. Newton’s date is in the old Julian calendar. On the calendar Galileo’s death is dated by, Newton was born on 4 January 1643, just under a year later.
Shakespeare and Cervantes: the same date, not the same day
Both are recorded as dying on 23 April 1616, and UNESCO chose 23 April for World Book Day partly for that reason. But Spain used the Gregorian calendar and England the Julian, so Shakespeare’s 23 April was 3 May in Spain. Cervantes was buried on 23 April and probably died the day before, which puts about eleven days between them.
Billy the Kid and Picasso
Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid at Fort Sumner, New Mexico, on 14 July 1881. Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga on 25 October of the same year. The Wild West outlaw and the painter of Guernica missed each other by three months.
Tolstoy and Gandhi: letters across two continents
In 1909 Gandhi, then a lawyer and campaigner in South Africa, read Tolstoy’s A Letter to a Hindu and wrote to him on 1 October to ask permission to reprint it. They wrote to each other until shortly before Tolstoy’s death in November 1910. In the meantime Gandhi set up a community outside Johannesburg and named it Tolstoy Farm.
Vienna, 1913
In 1913 five men who would shape the century were in the same city. Adolf Hitler was struggling to make a living as a painter. Leon Trotsky was living there in exile, and Joseph Stalin spent about a month in Vienna that year. Josip Broz, later Marshal Tito, was a young metalworker. Sigmund Freud had been practising there for decades. There is no evidence that any of them met.
Born in the same years
Queen Elizabeth II was born on 21 April 1926 and Marilyn Monroe on 1 June 1926. They met at a Royal Film Performance in London in October 1956, when both were 30.
Martin Luther King Jr. was born on 15 January 1929, Audrey Hepburn on 4 May and Anne Frank on 12 June. They are remembered from different decades, but they were born within five months of each other.
The Civil War pension paid until 2020
The longest overlap on this page runs through one family. Mose Triplett fought in the American Civil War and was 83 when his daughter Irene was born in 1930. She inherited his veteran’s pension and was paid $73.13 a month by the US government until she died on 31 May 2020, 155 years after the war ended.
Which Came First? runs on the same kind of surprise, with events instead of people: two moments in history, and you pick the earlier one.