William Playfair

Incandio publishes no likeness of William Playfair: no photograph exists that is out of copyright or offered under a licence this product may use, and every candidate found was refused rather than stretched. In place of a face the app shows a deliberate cipher — a monogram set on a ruled manuscript page — because a missing photograph must never quietly demote the person. The life below is complete; only the picture is missing.

Whatever The Eye Takes In · Engineer & Political Economist · 1759–1823

The Scottish draughtsman who invented the line graph and the bar chart in 1786 and the pie chart in 1801 — and who failed at nearly everything else he attempted.

Who was Playfair?

William Playfair was born in Dundee in 1759, the fourth son of a minister, and educated at home by his elder brother John, later the Edinburgh mathematician and geologist. He was apprenticed to Andrew Meikle, the millwright who invented the threshing machine, and then worked as a draughtsman and personal assistant to James Watt at the Soho works in Birmingham. Almost everything else he tried went wrong. A silversmith's business failed. He moved to Paris and became involved in the Scioto Company, a scheme selling land on the Ohio to French emigrants, which collapsed and left its subscribers ruined; his exact role remains disputed and is not to his credit. He was present at the storming of the Bastille, ran a bank, wrote pamphlets, produced propaganda against the French Revolution for the British government, spent time in prison for debt, and was pursued by creditors for most of his life. What survives is the graphics. The Commercial and Political Atlas of 1786 presented the trade of England not as tables of figures but as pictures: imports and exports drawn as lines rising and falling across a page against time, with the space between them shaded to show the balance. Where a continuous run of years was unavailable — as for Scotland, where he had one year's data — he drew bars instead, one per trading partner. Nobody had done either. The Statistical Breviary of 1801 went further and divided circles into sectors to show the parts of a whole, sizing the circles themselves to represent the totals being compared. His argument for all of it was always the same and always about the reader: a table is read one figure at a time and forgotten, while a picture of the same numbers is taken in at a glance and remembered. He was frank that he was not a mathematician. His brother was the respectable one. The inventions were slow to take hold in Britain and were adopted more readily in France and Germany. He died in London in 1823, poor.

Major achievements

Life in brief

Explore the life of Playfair — five chapters

  1. Millwright to Draughtsman — Learning to draw a quantity
  2. The Commercial and Political Atlas — 1786, and a page with no numbers on it
  3. Paris, and the Scioto Affair — The disaster in the middle of the life
  4. Cutting the Circle — The Statistical Breviary, 1801
  5. The Long Wait — Poor at his death, universal a century later

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