# How many people are still alive that were born in the 1800s? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [April 17, 2008, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705 "2008-04-17T10:38:18Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 18\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 10:38am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/1 "2008-04-17T10:38:18Z")
I know it’s impossible to get an exact number, but are there any good estimates out there? I’m just curious. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 10:54am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/2 "2008-04-17T10:54:48Z")
This might help a little: [http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/2007MortAgeStandardized/en/](http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/2007MortAgeStandardized/en/) It has a table of mortality by age - the world average survival for age 100+ is 0.005% - that doesn’t take us quite back to the 19th century though - but note that the percentage of people surviving to 95+ is 0.04% - greater almost by a factor of ten. Pulling a figure completely out of my arse, It seems not unreasonable to assume that the number of people surviving beyond age 105 would be perhaps one tenth of those making it past 100 (maybe drastically less, if that thing about getting the Queen’s telegram, then expiring has any truth to it) - so maybe 0.0005% of the world’s population - or (globally) one person out of 200,000 - or maybe 30,000 people in the world (actually that seems high - and of course they’re going to be dropping at a very non-linear rate by this point, so maybe only a hundredth of those surviving 100 make it to 105+ ---
**Author:** ![Baffle](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/dec6dc/32.png) [@Baffle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Baffle)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 11:14am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/3 "2008-04-17T11:14:00Z")
Here’s the opposite end of your spectrum: living people over the age of 110. > **[List of oldest living people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_living_supercentenarians)** > > This is a list of the oldest living people who have been verified to be alive as of the dates of the cited supporting sources. It was estimated in 2015 that between 150 and 600 living people had reached the age of 110. The true number is uncertain, as not all supercentenarians are known to researchers at a given time, and some claims cannot be validated or are fraudulent. > Maria Branyas of Spain is the world's oldest living person whose age has been validated. A whole 75 of them. (And another 29 unverified.) There’d have to be a lot of people between 107 and 110 to even come near **Mangetout’s** WAG estimate. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 11:26am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/4 "2008-04-17T11:26:25Z")
[QUOTE=Baffle] A whole 75 of them. (And another 29 unverified.) There’d have to be a lot of people between 107 and 110 to even come near **Mangetout’s** WAG estimate. [/QUOTE] Yeah - I’m not _too_ surprised about that. I think there’s quite a big mortality spike _right at_ age 100 - I’ve heard it said that a lot of people seem to hang on for that milestone, then give up, but I don’t know how true that can be. After age 100, they must start dropping at a rapidly increasing rate. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 11:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/5 "2008-04-17T11:27:58Z")
[QUOTE=Mangetout] This might help a little: [http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/2007MortAgeStandardized/en/](http://www.who.int/whosis/indicators/2007MortAgeStandardized/en/) It has a table of mortality by age - the world average survival for age 100+ is 0.005% - that doesn’t take us quite back to the 19th century though - but note that the percentage of people surviving to 95+ is 0.04% - greater almost by a factor of ten. Pulling a figure completely out of my arse, It seems not unreasonable to assume that the number of people surviving beyond age 105 would be perhaps one tenth of those making it past 100 (maybe drastically less, if that thing about getting the Queen’s telegram, then expiring has any truth to it) - so maybe 0.0005% of the world’s population - or (globally) one person out of 200,000 - or maybe 30,000 people in the world (actually that seems high - and of course they’re going to be dropping at a very non-linear rate by this point, so maybe only a hundredth of those surviving 100 make it to 105+ [/QUOTE] I would have thought that if the number reaching 100 is only about one-tenth as great as the number reaching 95, then the number reaching 105 would be a lot less than one-tenth of that. I’d expect the mortality rate to go up exponentially rather than linearly once you get past a certain age. That got me Googling. I found [this](http://64.233.183.104/search?q=cache:FQI83Ki5HyUJ:paa2005.princeton.edu/download.aspx%3FsubmissionId%3D51387+percentage+centenarians+live+to+105&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=5&gl=uk) (Google HTML cache of a PDF file) which, on a quick skim-through, seems to suggest that the mortality rate actually levels off once you get really old. Odd. There are some interesting graphs in the original PDF using Social Security data. Looks like the average life expectancy for people on their 100th birthday was about two and a quarter years. If I am reading it right, though, it says that 53 people out of a data set of 190,696 people reached the age of 110. That’s nearly 0.03%, which seems extraordinarily high! ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 11:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/6 "2008-04-17T11:31:52Z")
[QUOTE=Colophon] If I am reading it right, though, it says that 53 people out of a data set of 190,696 people reached the age of 110. That’s nearly 0.03%, which seems extraordinarily high! [/QUOTE] Yeah, but I think there will be some geographic bias in there. Do the same exercise in some parts of Africa and I think you’d end up with a nice round number. Circular, in fact. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/7 "2008-04-17T12:20:20Z")
[Wikipedia](if one considers only the total number of supercentenarians, this number falls dramatically to an estimated 300 to 450 worldwide, of which only approximately 80 are validated.) says that “if one considers only the total number of supercentenarians, this number falls dramatically to an estimated 300 to 450 worldwide, of which only approximately 80 are validated.” (Supercentenarians being those aged 110 or over.) Only about 1 in a thousand centenarians lives to 110, so my guesstimate therefore is that maybe 1 in 300 lives to be 108 and a five months, and so is still around now having been born before 1900. So that makes a ballpark figure of about 1500 people still alive who were born in the 1800s. (And, of course, more who can say they have lived through three centuries, as those born in 1900 would also count.) ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 12:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/8 "2008-04-17T12:25:33Z")
Also don’t forget that you have to apply whatever survival percentage you choose by the number of people born in years 1899, 1898, 1897, etc. It looks to me like somebody upthread made a big error by multiplying their survival percentage by the current world population. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 12:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/9 "2008-04-17T12:28:39Z")
[QUOTE=LSLGuy] Also don’t forget that you have to apply whatever survival percentage you choose by the number of people born in years 1899, 1898, 1897, etc. It looks to me like somebody upthread made a big error by multiplying their survival percentage by the current world population. [/QUOTE] That’s a very good point. Hadn’t thought of that :smack: Still, it doesn’t affect my estimate as that is based on the present number of centenarians, which I can’t imagine is hugely different from the number eight years ago. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/10 "2008-04-17T12:53:18Z")
[QUOTE=LSLGuy] Also don’t forget that you have to apply whatever survival percentage you choose by the number of people born in years 1899, 1898, 1897, etc. It looks to me like somebody upthread made a big error by multiplying their survival percentage by the current world population. [/QUOTE] I’m not entirely sure how it makes a difference - as the only way to _be_ 100+ now, is to have been born more than 100 years ago - so the breakdown of current population by age (which, OK, that table _isn’t_) would naturally incorporate those adjustments. ---
**Author:** ![Colophon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f05b48/32.png) [@Colophon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colophon)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 2:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/11 "2008-04-17T14:33:12Z")
Er, yes. Another :smack: for me. ---
**Author:** ![Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/46a35a/32.png) [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)\ **Post date:** [April 17, 2008, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/12 "2008-04-17T19:52:40Z")
[QUOTE=Mangetout] (maybe drastically less, if that thing about getting the Queen’s telegram, then expiring has any truth to it) [/QUOTE] What the heck are you talking about here? I’ve heard about the “Royal Touch” being a cure for disease (scrofula, mostly); does a royal telegram have the opposite effect? Besides, I thought that superstition went away long before the invention of the telegram. ---
**Author:** ![commasense](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/commasense/32/3017_2.png) [@commasense](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/commasense)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 1:55am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/13 "2008-04-18T01:55:21Z")
[QUOTE=Mangetout] After age 100, they must start dropping at a rapidly increasing rate. [/QUOTE] Not necessarily. [George Burns](http://us.imdb.com/name/nm0122675/) (who made it to 100 himself) said, “If you live to be one hundred, you’ve got it made. Very few people die past that age.” ---
**Author:** ![The\_Them](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/t/898d66/32.png) [@The\_Them](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Them)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 4:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/14 "2008-04-18T04:04:52Z")
Another p\*\*\* i\* o\*\* o\* y\*\*\* a\*\* figure. Couple years ago, I looked up some info on this same question. I tabulated the numbers of confirmed folks still living who were born before 1900, made some generous guesstimates to include those who lived in the rest of the world who would prolly not be included in the official records, and came up with \<20,000. Which still seems like a lot, but _¿quien sabe?_ ---
**Author:** ![R.P.McMurphy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/7993a0/32.png) [@R.P.McMurphy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/R.P.McMurphy)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 12:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/15 "2008-04-18T12:16:48Z")
An expert in life insurance actuarials told me that although the number of people living to be 100 is increasing, people simply don’t live past the age of 114. Not that nobody ever has but the number is so few that it doesn’t make a blip on the chart. We are getting close to the point where people born in the 19th Century are reaching the limit so there can’t be very many out there. ---
**Author:** ![Renob](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8c91f0/32.png) [@Renob](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renob)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 2:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/16 "2008-04-18T14:10:24Z")
[QUOTE=Baffle] Here’s the opposite end of your spectrum: living people over the age of 110. > **[List of oldest living people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_living_supercentenarians)** > > This is a list of the oldest living people who have been verified to be alive as of the dates of the cited supporting sources. It was estimated in 2015 that between 150 and 600 living people had reached the age of 110. The true number is uncertain, as not all supercentenarians are known to researchers at a given time, and some claims cannot be validated or are fraudulent. Nearly all the top 50 oldest living people are women, as women live longer than men on average. A list of the oldest A whole 75 of them. (And another 29 unverified.) There’d have to be a lot of people between 107 and 110 to even come near **Mangetout’s** WAG estimate. [/QUOTE] The oldest person will be 115 on Sunday. Amazing. ---
**Author:** ![Mangetout](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mangetout/32/19_2.png) [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/17 "2008-04-18T14:14:23Z")
[QUOTE=t-bonham@scc.net] What the heck are you talking about here? I’ve heard about the “Royal Touch” being a cure for disease (scrofula, mostly); does a royal telegram have the opposite effect? Besides, I thought that superstition went away long before the invention of the telegram. [/QUOTE] UK Citizens get a telegram from HRH if they live to age 100. What I’m talking about, though, is that I seem to remember reading that a lot of people die within a few days of their hundredth birthday - as if they’ve been hanging on, then there’s nothing else to live for. I don’t know how much, if any, truth there is to that, or if it’s just confirmation bias (after all, six months after your 100th birthday might still be ‘soon’ in some people’s estimation). ---
**Author:** ![MikeS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/919ad9/32.png) [@MikeS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MikeS)\ **Post date:** [April 18, 2008, 3:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/how-many-people-are-still-alive-that-were-born-in-the-1800s/445705/18 "2008-04-18T15:29:38Z")
We’ve done this thread once or twice before, although granted the last time was [over a year ago](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=406738) and the numbers will change rapidly from year to year at this point.