Playfair’s Charts

Like Joseph Priestley, William Playfair (1759–1823) was a brilliant thinker and a restless soul.

He was born to a genteel Scottish family, with older brothers who became a noted mathematician and a noted architect.

Playfair’s Wikipedia entry says he worked variously as “a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, banker, ardent royalist, de facto intelligence officer, convict, editor, blackmailer and journalist.”

I bring up William Playfair here because he gets credit for introducing several of the infographics we’re used to. In 1786 his Commercial and Political Atlas introduced the line, area, and bar charts to show economic data.

Fifteen years later, in The Statistical Breviary, Playfair published what seems to be the first pie chart. Denis François Donnant translated that book into French, adding his own information on the U.S. of A.

In 1805 Playfair translated Donnant’s additions into English as a Statistical Account of the United States of America, adding this pie chart to show the relative land areas of the American states and territories after the Louisiana Purchase.