AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |
Back to Blog
Academics conduct studies about which Playfair invention performs better. Playfair’s graphic innovations went beyond the pie chart: he also invented the bar graph. As the historian Hugh Small notes, Nightingale may not have invented statistical graphs, but “she may have been the first to use them for persuading people of the need for change.” ![]() Florence Nightingale drove home the impact of poor sanitary conditions on mortality rates during the Crimean War by reconfiguring a pie chart, varying the length, rather than the width, of the wedges, so that the graph resembled a cock’s comb. In France, the pie chart became known as le camembert, because of the way a wheel of cheese is typically divided. One of its first champions was Charles Joseph Minard, an engineer who once used a flow map to depict the casualties Napoleon’s army suffered during the Russian campaign. ![]() But, Spence writes, it was “the first pie chart to display empirical proportions and to differentiate the component parts by color.”īy midcentury, the pie chart was growing in popularity. Europe was made red to indicate it was a “land power.” It’s not clear why Playfair made Africa yellow, or what inspired him to make a circle graph at all. According to a paper called “No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a Statistical Chart” by Ian Spence, professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, Asia’s wedge was the largest and colored green, to indicate that it was a maritime power. ![]() Seeking to illustrate the Turkish Empire’s landholdings for his statistical breviary on the European nation-states, Playfair sliced a circle into three wedges whose sizes were determined by land area. William Playfair - a businessman, engineer and economics writer from Scotland - created the first known pie chart in 1801.
0 Comments
Read More
Leave a Reply. |