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| Preface | |
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| Introduction | |
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| William Playfair and the Origins of Graphical Display | |
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| Why Playfair? | |
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| All of the pieces were in place for the invention of statistical graphics long before Playfair was born. Why didn't anyone else invent them? Why did Playfair? | |
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| Who Was Playfair? | |
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| Playfair (1759-1823) was an inventor and ardent advocate of statistical graphics Ian Spence Howard Wainer William | |
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| Here we tell a bit about his life | |
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| William Playfair | |
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| A Daring Worthless Fellow 24 Ian Spence Howard Wainer | |
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| Audacity was an important personality trait for the invention of graphics because the inventor had to move counter to the Cartesian approach to science | |
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| We illustrate this quality in Playfair by describing his failed attempt to blackmail one of the richest lords of Great Britain | |
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| Scaling the Heights (and Widths) 28 The message conveyed by a statistical graphic can be distorted by manipulating the aspect ratio, the ratio of a graph's width to its height | |
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| Playfair deployed this ability in a masterly way, providing a guide to future display technology | |
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| A Priestley View of International Currency Exchanges | |
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| A recent plot of the operating hours of international currency exchanges confuses matters terribly | |
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| Why? We find that when we use a different graphical form, developed Joseph Priestley in 1765, the structure becomes clear | |
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| We also learn how Priestley discovered the latent graphicacy in his (and our) audiences | |
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| Tom's Veggies and the American Way | |
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| European intellectuals were not the only ones graphing data | |
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| During a visit to Paris (and prompted by letters from, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) learned of this invention and he later put it to a more practical use than the depiction of the life spans of heroes from classical antiquity | |
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| The Graphical Inventions of Dubourg and Ferguson: Two Precursors to William Playfair | |
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| Although he developed the line chart independently, Priestley was not the first to do so | |
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| The earliest seems to be the Parisian physician Jacques Barbeau-Dubourg (1709-1779), who created a wonderful graphical scroll in 1753 | |
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| Graphical representation must have been in the air, for the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) added his version of time lines to the mix in 1780 | |
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| Winds across Europe: Francis Galton and the Graphic Discovery of Weather Patterns | |
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| In 1861, Francis Galton organized weather observatories throughout Western Europe to gather data in a standardized way | |
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| He organized these data and presented them as a series of ninety-three maps and charts, from which he confirmed the existence of the anticyclonic movement of winds around a low-pressure zone | |
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| Using Graphical Displays to Understand the Modern World | |
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| A Graphical Investigation of the Scourge of Vietnam | |
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| During the Vietnam War, average SAT scores went down for those students who were not in the military | |
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| In addition, the average ASVAB scores (the test used by the military to classify all members of the military) also declined | |
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| This Lake Wobegon-like puzzle is solved graphically | |
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| Two Mind-Bending Statistical Paradoxes | |
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| The odd phenomenon observed with test scores during the Vietnam War is not unusual | |
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| We illustrate this seeming paradox with other instances, show how to avoid them, and then discuss an even subtler statistical pitfall that has entrapped many illustrious would-be data analysts. Ch | |