The Birth of Statistical Graphics and Their European Childhood
On the historical development of W.E.B. Du Bois’s graphical narrative of a people
In 1786, when the Scot William Playfair published his Commercial and Political Atlas, the clock of scientific progress, which has only two positions, moved to “after” (Berlinski, 1995).
There were graphs before Playfair; Michael Florent van Langren drew a linear plot in 1644 to show the inaccuracies in the measurement of longitude; in 1669, Christiaan Huygens sent a graph of life expectancies to his brother Lodewijk, based on the data in John Graunt’s Bills of Mortality; and the eponymous Robert Plot sent a graphic “History of the Weather” to Martin Lister in 1685 (Wainer, 2005).
But these were all essentially unique events.
None of Playfair’s predecessors used the tool of graphic representation coherently toward a goal of broad communication of quantitative phenomena. And no one before him constructed displays as richly filled with information as did the remarkable Scot, nor designed and executed them as beautifully.
Playfair’s plots were narrowly focused on financial topics—primarily imports and exports, with rare side trips to topics like the national debt and the size of the sinking fund. He also produced one plot comparing the sizes of various countries (both physical size and population), including what continents the countries were in (it was for this aspect that he invented the pie chart) (Playfair, 1801/Wainer, 2007—two publications).
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