List of Famous people who died in 1978

Ralph Harold Metcalfe Sr. was an American track and field sprinter and politician. He jointly held the world record in the 100-meter dash and placed second in that event in two Olympics, first to Eddie Tolan in 1932 at Los Angeles and then to Jesse Owens at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, Germany. Metcalfe won four Olympic medals and was regarded as the world's fastest human in 1934 and 1935. He later went into politics in the city of Chicago and served in the United States Congress for four terms in the 1970s as a Democrat from Illinois.

Karl Paul Gerhard Link was an American biochemist best known for his discovery of the anticoagulant warfarin.

The Kate Sharpley Library is a library dedicated to anarchist texts and history. Started in 1979 and reorganized in 1991, it currently holds around ten thousand English language volumes, pamphlets and periodicals.

Baron Leo Frédéric Alfred d'Erlanger, also Leo Friedrich Alfred Baron von Erlanger was an English merchant banker and air transport promoter, Chairman of the Erlanger Bank and of the Channel Tunnel Company.

Herbert Dingle was an English physicist and philosopher of science, who served as president of the Royal Astronomical Society from 1951 to 1953. He is best known for his opposition to Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity and the protracted controversy that this provoked.

Claude A. Watson was an American politician, lawyer, businessman, and minister from Hermon, who was nationally active in the temperance movement and the Prohibition Party. He is currently the most recent presidential nominee of the Prohibition party to have received over 100,000 votes.

Naoki Hoshino was a bureaucrat and politician who served in the Taishō and early Shōwa period Japanese government, and as an official in the Empire of Manchukuo.

Karl Ferdinand Herzfeld was an Austrian-American physicist.

Milton de Oliveira Ismael Silva, known as Ismael Silva, was a Brazilian samba musician. In 1925 he had his first recorded his samba. His best-known compositions were Me faz carinhos, Se você jurar, Antonico, Para me livrar do mal, Novo amor, Ao romper da aurora, Tristezas não pagam dívidas, Me diga o teu nome, among others.