William Playfair the Scottish engineer and political economist was born on September 22nd 1759.
In a day where anniversaries are thin on the ground, thank god for William Henry Playfair.
I read one article about Playfair that describes him as "a kind of Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment" perhaps a bit harsh, I would say he was a bit of a polymath, another source in my opinion is more accurate, Playfair is without doubt to many of you out there "the most famous man you have never heard of" he rubbed shoulders with the era’s many giants, switching careers at the drop of a hat, and throwing himself headlong into history-changing events, from the storming of the Bastille to the settling of the American West.
William had a lot to live up to, his brothers were architect James Playfair and mathematician John Playfair, his father passed away when he was 13 and it was left to John to lead the family. After serving his apprenticeship with Andrew Meikle, the inventor of the threshing machine, Playfair became draftsman and personal assistant to James Watt at the Boulton and Watt steam engine factory in Soho, Birmingham then seems to have just wander from one trade to another, the way Gump wandered through life, so you can see where the analogy comes from.
William Playfair, was, during his adult life, (takes a deep breath) a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, convict, banker, ardent royalist, editor, blackmailer and journalist. Okay they are not all jobs, but they do put you in the picture a wee bit on the character of the man I think.
Most interestingly in my opinion was his time as a spy in France during the Revolution and was on the scene during the storming of the Bastille. He even helps trigger the first major political scandal in the newly formed United States, a land speculation gone bad involving Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson.
To go into all of this man's adventurers would take too long, instead I will just tell you that the one thing he did, that has been a part of all your lives, in one way or another, is he invented the graph. Before William invented the graph you had to read through pages of statistics to find things out, the graph, you "get it" in a glance. In 1786, he published The Commercial and Political Atlas, a compendium of bar and line charts representing different European countries’ imports, exports, wages, and other trends for which he had the data handy. As the man himself explained, “Men of high rank, or active business, can only pay attention to outlines… It is hoped that, with the Assistance of these Charts, such information will be got without the fatigue and trouble of studying the particulars.” he went on “No study is less alluring or more dry and tedious than statistics, unless the mind and imagination are set to work,” in the book’s introduction.
His old boss Watt, was sent a copy of the Commercial Atlas for review, and wasn't impressed, called the book “mere plummery” and its author “a Rascal.”
To finish I must say that he was a rather humble man and actually gave credit for the invention to his brother writing, “[John] taught me to know that whatever can be expressed in numbers, may be represented by lines,” Playfair wrote much later, in the introduction to one of his books of diagrams. “To the best and most affectionate of brothers, I owe the invention of [these] Charts.” He was never a success in his lifetime and was seen as a ditherer by Watt, William Playfair died in 1823, in poverty and relative obscurity, banned from any good society.
Slowly, over the next century or so, the supply of readily available data grew—as did the the public’s appetite for it. Bar, line and pie charts began trickling into newspapers and textbooks. Two hundred years later, as we barrel forward into the Information Age, you can’t click a link without stumbling upon some kind of data visualization. The next time you come across a graph, remember, like many other notable inventions in our history, take pride in that it was the work of a Scot that gave us these easy to read information "pictures".
