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Playfair, William, 1759-1823

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William Playfair (September 22, 1759 - February 11, 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist who made important innovations in the field of information graphics.

Playfairs' trade balance time series chart

Playfair, who argued that charts communicated better than tables of data, has been credited with inventing the line, bar, and pie charts. His time series plots are still presented as models of clarity.

Playfair first published The Commercial and Political Atlas in 1786, in London. It contained 43 time series plots and one bar chart, a form apparently introduced in this work. It has been described as the first major work to contain statistical graphs.

One of William Playfair's piechart in his Statistical Breviary, depicting the proportions of the Turkish Empire located in Asia, Europe and Africa before 1789.

Playfair's Statistical Breviary, published in London in 1801, contains what is generally credited as the first pie chart.^[1]^[2]

Life

Spence & Wainer (in Statisticians of the Centuries) describe Playfair as "engineer, political economist and scoundrel" while "Eminent Scotsmen" calls him an "ingenious mechanic and miscellaneous writer." It compares his career with the glorious one of his older brother John Playfair, the distinguished Edinburgh professor, and draws a moral about the importance of "steadiness and consistency of plan" as well as of "genius."

William was the fourth son of the Reverend James Playfair of the parish of Liff & Benvie near the city of Dundee, Scotland. The Reverend James died when William was small and his education was "superintended" by his brother John. William's career as an engineer took him from working for James Watt as draftsman and personal assistant to making inventions. He spent an eventful time in Paris, taking part in the storming of the Bastille. In London he opened a "security bank" which failed. He was a prolific writer from an early age and in the latter part of his life supported himself by writing. (The works for which he is now famous are not mentioned in the obituary and they only began to be appreciated in the twentieth century.)

William's other notable brother was the architect James Playfair.

Notes

^ Tufte, p. 44
^ Spence, Ian. No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a statistical Chart. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. Winter 2005, 30 (4), 353–368.

References

Playfair, William (1786). The Commercial and Political Atlas: Representing, by Means of Stained Copper-Plate Charts, the Progress of the Commerce, Revenues, Expenditure and Debts of England during the Whole of the Eighteenth Century.
Playfair, William (2005). Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0-521-85554-3.
Spence, Ian and Howard Wainer (1997). Who Was Playfair ?. Chance 10, p. 35–37.
Spence, Ian and Howard Wainer (C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta, eds.) (2001). "William Playfair". Statisticians of the Centuries: 105–110.
Tufte, Edward R. (2001). The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Chesire, CT: Graphics Press. ISBN 0961392142.