1796 births

Charles Hector Jacquinot (4 March 1796 – 17 November 1879) was a noted mariner, best known for his role in early French Antarctic surveys.

Joseph Paul Gaimard (31 January 1793 – 10 December 1858) was a French naval surgeon and naturalist.

Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot (French pronunciation: [nikɔla leɔnaʁ sadi kaʁno]; 1 June 1796 – 24 August 1832) was a French mechanical engineer in the French Army, military scientist and physicist, often described as the "father of thermodynamics". He published only one book, the Reflections on the Motive Power of Fire (Paris, 1824), in which he expressed the first successful theory of the maximum efficiency of heat engines and laid the foundations of the new discipline: thermodynamics. Carnot's work attracted little attention during his lifetime, but it was later used by Rudolf Clausius and Lord Kelvin to formalize the second law of thermodynamics and define the concept of entropy. Driven by purely technical concerns, such as improving the performance of the steam engine, Sadi Carnot's theoretical work laid important foundations for modern science as well as technologies such as the automobile and jet engine.
His father Lazare Carnot was an eminent mathematician, military engineer, and leader of the French Revolutionary Army.

August Wilhelm Bach (4 October 1796 – 15 April 1869), was a German composer and organist, from Berlin.He studied with his father, Gottfried, as well as with Carl Friedrich Zelter and Ludwig Berger as well as at the Singing Academy in Berlin. In 1816 he served as an organist at St Mary's Church and from 1820 he taught organ and music theory at the Institute of Church Music set up by Zelter. In 1832, Bach succeeded Zelter as the director of the Royal Institute of Church Music in Berlin. He also taught at the Prussian Academy of Arts. His compositions largely consist of sacred works and works for keyboard. He also wrote a pipe organ method and a hymnbook.
He is unrelated to the family of Johann Sebastian Bach.

William Nanson Lettsom (1796–1865) was an English man of letters.

Achille Etna Michallon (1796–1822) was a French painter.
Michallon was the son of the sculptor Claude Michallon and nephew of the sculptor Guillaume Francin. He studied under Jacques-Louis David and Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes. In 1817, Michallon won the inaugural Prix de Rome for landscape painting. He travelled to Italy in 1818 and remained there for over two years. This trip had a profound influence on his work. Before he had much time to develop what he had learned however, he died at the age of 25 of pneumonia, a tragedy which cut short the life of a talented and well respected artist who could have gone on to win lasting fame. Though it is often disputed, it is thought that at one time, Corot was his pupil.

Karl August Georg Maximilian Graf von Platen-Hallermünde (24 October 1796 – 5 December 1835) was a German poet and dramatist. In German he mostly is called Graf (Count) Platen.