Playfair’s Early Data Visualizations

A data visualization by William Playfair from his book The Commercial and Political Atlas and Statistical Breviary, from the early 1800s.  Playfair pioneered many of the chart forms we know today, though the one above I find fascinatingly new, a sort of combination of the pie and bar graph.

Image via (and much higher-resolution version): USU
Originally found via a very nice reprint by Cambridge University Press

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