# Who is the most influential person of the 18th century?

> A century of revolutions, symphonies and steam engines, argued down to a single name.

*By YPB Team · Published August 11, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-influential-person-of-the-18th-century*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **Benjamin Franklin**
   Shaped the century's science, its printing trade and the founding of a new republic.
2. **George Washington**
   Won the American war of independence and then handed power back, twice.
3. **James Watt**
   His improved steam engine set the Industrial Revolution's pace for a century.
4. **Voltaire**
   The Enlightenment's sharpest polemicist against censorship, torture and clerical power.
5. **Adam Smith**
   The Wealth of Nations founded economics as a subject in 1776.
6. **Jean-Jacques Rousseau**
   His writing on the social contract and on childhood reshaped politics and education.
7. **Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart**
   Wrote more than six hundred works in thirty-five years and redefined every form he touched.
8. **Immanuel Kant**
   The Critique of Pure Reason split philosophy into before and after.
9. **Catherine the Great**
   Expanded Russia's borders and its court culture across thirty-four years on the throne.
10. **Thomas Jefferson**
   Wrote the Declaration of Independence at thirty-three.
11. **Carl Linnaeus**
   Invented the naming system that still organises every living species.
12. **Antoine Lavoisier**
   Named oxygen, killed the phlogiston theory and made chemistry quantitative.
13. **Johann Sebastian Bach**
   Left the century its deepest body of keyboard and choral music.
14. **Edward Jenner**
   Developed the smallpox vaccine and with it the whole idea of vaccination.
15. **Mary Wollstonecraft**
   A Vindication of the Rights of Woman put gender equality on the Enlightenment agenda.

Tags: legends, 18th century