William Playfair (22 September 1759 – 11 February 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist. The founder of graphical methods of statistics,Paul J. FitzPatrick (1960). "Leading British Statisticians of the Nineteenth Century". In: Journal of the American Statistical Association, Vol. 55, No. 289 (Mar. 1960), pp. 38–70. Playfair invented several types of diagrams: in 1786 he introduced the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 he published what were likely the first pie chart and circle graph, used to show part-whole relations.Michael Friendly (2008). "Milestones in the history of thematic cartography, statistical graphics, and data visualization" . pp 13–14. Retrieved 7 July 2008. Playfair has been reported to have been a secret agent for the British Government, although this has sometimes been a subject of controversy.
Biography William Playfair was born in 1759 in Scotland. He was the fourth son, named after his grandfather, of the Reverend James Playfair of the parish of Liff & Benvie near the city of Dundee in Scotland. His notable brothers were architect James Playfair and mathematician John Playfair. His father died in 1772 when he was 13, leaving the eldest brother John to care for the family and his education. After his apprenticeship with Andrew Meikle, the inventor of the threshing machine, Playfair became an engine erector, draftsman and personal assistant to James Watt at the Boulton and Watt steam engine manufactory in Soho, Birmingham.Ian Spence and Howard Wainer (1997). "Who Was Playfair? ". In: Chance 10, p. 35–37.H.W. Dickinson and R. Jenkins, James Watt and the Steam Engine The Memorial Volume Prepared for the Committee of the Watt Centenary Commemoration at Birmingham, 1919, reprint (London: Encore Editions, 1989), pp. 265-267, 284-285.
Playfair had a variety of careers. He was, in turn, a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, banker, ardent royalist, de facto intelligence officer, convict, editor, blackmailer and journalist. On leaving Watt's company in 1782, he set up a silversmithing business and shop in London, which failed. In 1787 he moved to Paris, being present for the storming of the Bastille two years later. During the French Revolution, as many Frenchmen were seeking safety and opportunity, Playfair played a role in the Scioto Land sale to French settlers in the Ohio River Valley.
In 1793, after earning the ire of Republican leaders, he escaped to London. In 1797 he opened "The Original Security Bank" with partners John Casper Hartsinck and Julius Hutchinson to provide small-denomination currency. The bank failed, and he thereafter worked as a writer and pamphleteer, and also did some engineering work.
After returning to England, Playfair secretly provided support to the British government throughout the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars—specifically, Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas,William Playfair, A Statement, Which Was Made in October, to Earl Bathhurst, One of His Majesty's Principal Secretaries of State, and in November, 1814, to the Comte de La Chatre, the French ambassador, of Buonaparte's Plot to Re-usurp the Crown of France p. 14 https://archive.org/details/statementwhichwa00playuoft/page/n3/mode/2upJustin Pollard, "The Eccentric Engineer: William Playfair and his Many, Varied and Unappreciated Careers" Engineering and Technologyhttps://eandt.theiet.org/2020/03/22/eccentric-engineer-william-playfair-and-his-many-varied-and-unappreciated-careers Secretary at War William Windham,Patricia Costigan-Eaves and Michael Macdonald-Ross, "William Playfair (1759-1823)" Statistical Science Vol. 5, No. 3 (Aug., 1990), 318-326 and Permanent Undersecretary of State Evan NepeanArthur Aspinall, Politics and the Press (London: Home & Van Thal Ltd, 1949) 153 https://archive.org/details/politicspressc170000aasp/page/152/mode/2up?q=playfairElizabeth Sparrow, "Secret Service Under Pitt's Administrations" History 83, 207 (April 1998) 280-294 (the de facto chief of civilian intelligence)--pre-dating the formal establishment of the modern British intelligence establishment that emerged in the 1900s. Playfair provided information on events in France and proposed various propaganda and clandestine operations aimed at undermining the French government.
After the failure of the Original Security Bank, Playfair was imprisoned for debt in the Fleet Prison, being released in 1802.
Work Ian Spence and Howard Wainer in 2001 describe Playfair as "engineer, political economist and scoundrel" while "Eminent Scotsmen" calls him an "ingenious mechanic and miscellaneous writer".Ian Spence and Howard Wainer (2001). "William Playfair". In: Statisticians of the Centuries. C.C. Heyde and E. Seneta (eds.) New York: Springer. pp. 105–110. It compares his career with the glorious one of his older brother John Playfair, the distinguished Edinburgh mathematics professor, and draws a moral about the importance of "steadiness and consistency of plan" as well as of "genius". Bruce Berkowitz in 2018 provides a detailed portrait of Playfair as an "ambitious, audacious, and woefully imperfect British patriot" who undertook the "most complex covert operation anyone had ever conceived".
Statistical graphics Playfair, who argued that charts communicated better than tables of data, has been credited with inventing the line, bar, area, and pie charts. His time-series plots are still presented as models of clarity.
Playfair first published The Commercial and Political Atlas in London in 1786. It contained 43 time-series plots and one bar chart, a form apparently introduced in this work. It has been described by Ian Spence and Howard Wainer as the first major work to contain statistical graphs.
Line charts In 1786 Playfair published what is thought to be the earliest statistical graphic—that is, a visual representation of the relationship of two or more variables)--in his Commercial and Political Atlas when he depicted in a line chart the balance of trade between England and other nations, using customs data.Edward R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Data (Cheshire, Conn.: Graphics Press, 1983) 32
Bar charts Two decades before Playfair published the Atlas, in 1765 Joseph Priestley had created the innovation of the first timeline charts, in which individual bars were used to visualise the life span of a person, and the whole can be used to compare the life spans of multiple persons. According to James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn, "Priestley's timelines proved a commercial success and a popular sensation, and went through dozens of editions".James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn (1978). "Quantitative graphics in statistics: A brief history". In: The American Statistician. 32: pp. 1–11.
These timelines likely inspired Playfair's invention of the bar chart, which first appeared in his Commercial and Political Atlas, published in 1786. According to Beniger and Robyn, Playfair was driven to this invention by a lack of data. In his Atlas he had collected a series of 34 plates about the import and export from different countries over the years, which he presented as line graphs or surface charts: line graphs shaded or tinted between abscissa and function. Because Playfair lacked the necessary series data for Scotland, he graphed its trade data for a single year as a series of 34 bars, one for each of 17 trading partners.
In Playfair's bar chart Scotland's imports and exports from and to 17 countries in 1781 are represented. "This bar chart was the first quantitative graphical form that did not locate data either in space, as had coordinates and tables, or time, as had Priestley's timelines. It constitutes a pure solution to the problem of discrete quantitative comparison".
The idea of representing data as a series of bars had earlier (14th century) been published by Jacobus de Sancto Martino and attributed to Nicole Oresme. Oresme used the bars to generate a graph of velocity against continuously varying time. Playfair's use of bars was to generate a chart of discrete measurements.
Pie charts Playfair introduced the pie chart as a means to show proportion in The Statistical Breviary. At the time Playfair sought a means to represent the relative numbers of European, African, and Asian peoples within the Ottoman Empire. Playfair also used a pie chart in a graphic he provided for D. Donnant's Statistical Account of the United States of America to show the relative distribution of land among the states.
Tables of national statistics Playfair's 1801 The Statistical BreviaryWilliam Playfair, The Statistical Breviary: Shewing the Resources of Every State and Kingdom in Europe https://archive.org/details/statisticalbrev00playgoog/page/n8/mode/2up was likely the first nation-by-nation compilation of national statistics on area, population, and military capabilities.Ian Spence (2005). "No Humble Pie: The Origins and Usage of a statistical Chart" . Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics. Winter 2005, 30 (4), 353–368. Its users included Thomas Jefferson, a proponent of a national system of statistics, and Alexander von Humboldt, often cited as a pioneer of modern geography.Sandra Rebok Humboldt and Jefferson A Transatlantic Friendship of the Enlightenment https://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4332/James R. Beniger and Dorothy L. Robyn "The History and Future of Graphics in Statistics http://www.asasrms.org/Proceedings/y1976/The%20History%20And%20Future%20Of%20Graphics%20In%20Statistics.pdf“Alexander von Humboldt to Thomas Jefferson, 12 June 1809,” Founders Online, National Archives, https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/03-01-02-0215. The Breviary anticipated modern publications such as the Statesman's Yearbook and the CIA's World FactBook.
Other works From 1809 until 1811, Playfair published the massive British Family Antiquity, Illustrative of the Origin and Progress of the Rank, Honours and Personal Merit of the Nobility of the United Kingdom. Accompanied with an Elegant Set of Chronological Charts. The work was nine large volumes in eleven parts; Volume Six contained a suite of twelve plates of which ten are in two states, coloured and uncoloured, and 9 large folding tables, partly hand coloured.
This was an important work on genealogy published in a very limited edition. In it, Playfair sought to show the true character and heroism of the British nobility and that the Monarchy, particularly the British Monarchy, is the true defender of liberty. The volumes are separated into the peerage and baronetage of England, Scotland and Ireland.
Clandestine activities In 1793, during the War of the First Coalition, Playfair devised a plan for a covert operation that he most probably presented to Henry Dundas, who was home secretary and soon to become Britain's secretary of state for war. Playfair proposed to "fabricate one hundred millions of assignats (the French currency) and spread them in France by every means in my power."Samuel Wilson (blog) Historic Environment Scotland "The Scottish Engineer Who Devised a Secret Plan to Destabilise the French Economy" https://blog.historicenvironment.scot/2018/09/adventure-scotland-europe/