The badly-behaved blackmailer who invented the graph
The Long-termist's Field Guide: 1,000 Ideas For The Next 1,000 Years
You’re reading The Long-termist’s Field Guide, a newsletter about long-term thinking. This edition profiles the man who invented graphs, a tool which transformed how we visualise change over time. If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s some context.
When you think about long-term trends like rising carbon, wealth or population, how do you visualise these changes?
One of the clearest ways to do it is like this, using a graph with time on the x-axis:
So ubiquitous are such time-series charts within classrooms, news sites, company presentations, and scientific papers that it’s difficult to imagine how we’d operate without them.
However before the 1800s, people had to rely on lists of numbers to track short- and long-term trends. Graphs had to be invented – and when they were, they offered a whole new temporal lens for the world. An effective graph allows people to see change that might otherwise be extremely difficult to digest, and therefore has the power to enlighten, warn or persuade.
Who, then, do we owe the idea of the statistical graph? The man responsible – William Playfair – was a complicated figure with a poor reputation in 18th-19th Century British society, and who died without recognition for his graphical contributions. His story is worth telling, because not only does he deserve to be better known for providing a tool that helps us understand long-term change, it speaks to the way that good ideas take root (and why they sometimes don’t).
“A rogue and scoundrel”
To say Playfair was a man with side-hustles would be an understatement. “He was, in turn, 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. Some of his business activities were questionable, if not downright illegal, and it may be fairly said that he was something of a rogue and scoundrel,” write the statisticians Ian Spence and Howard Wainer, who have pieced together Playfair’s biography.
In the late 1700s, Playfair was involved in various episodes of bad behaviour: he was forced to flee to France after libelling someone, attempted to extort money from one of Scotland's richest men, and pursued some dubious financial swindles, one of which earned him a conviction in 1805. He was also widely disliked for his controversial public writing. Following his death in 1823, one obituary lamented a lost talent: “Had Mr. Playfair cultivated his mechanical genius, there is no doubt, that he would not only have obtained considerable eminence, but have rendered no inconsiderable service to this country. Unhappily, however, for his own interests, he had the ambition to become an author.”
Playfair couldn’t really have blamed his circumstances for his reputation. He came from a good family and across his life crossed paths with many eminent and well-connected intellectuals. His older brother was John Playfair, a respected geologist, mathematician and physicist, who would be among the first to contemplate the meaning of geological deep time. And William began his career working as a draftsman for the influential Scottish engineer James Watt, whose steam engines drove the Industrial Revolution. While Watt once described him as a “blunderer” in his drafting, the pair worked together for many years, and Watt saw him as “assiduous and obedient”.
“He’s the Forrest Gump of his era – except, unlike Gump, he’s brilliant”
Playfair also happened to be at the right place and time at various historical turning points. “He appears everywhere; he knows everyone,” writes Bruce Berkowitz in his 2018 biography of Playfair. “Time and again, he’s at the hinge point of history: the Industrial Revolution, the French Revolution, the founding of the United States, the birth of modern economics, the Age of Napoleon… He’s the Forrest Gump of his era – except, unlike Gump, he’s brilliant, and, unlike Gump, he’s not just an accidental witness stumbling on the scene – he’s shaping and driving events.”
So, where did his inspiration for graphs come from? With hindsight, you might trace it back to when he was a teenager. When his brother John was 24 years-old, and William was 12, their father, a minister in the Church of Scotland, died, which meant John was charged with educating his younger siblings. One task he gave the young William was to keep a record of daily temperatures. Combined with the drafting techniques he later learnt from Watt, it’s tantalising to wonder whether these experiences planted the seeds for The Commercial and Political Atlas, which he published in his 20s.
This wasn’t an atlas representing space, but quantities within time. It contained 44 charts, summarising trade between England and other nations, as well as economic data. It’s difficult to imagine that such charts were anything special, but this had never been done with economic data. Here’s one example:
Over the following years, he would update the Atlas with new editions, and continue to make the case for graphical representation of statistics as a means of understanding the world. “As the knowledge of mankind increases, and transactions multiply, it becomes more and more desirable to abbreviate and facilitate the modes of conveying information,” he wrote in 1798.
In 1801, he published another volume called the Statistical Breviary, which introduced three more types of diagram, including the pie chart. “Making an appeal to the eye when proportion and magnitude are concerned, is the best and readiest method of conveying a distinct idea,” he wrote in the preface.
By the end of his life, he was producing impressively complex charts like this one, which wouldn’t look out of place in Our World in Data:
However, despite his best efforts, his graphical ideas did not resonate within his lifetime. It was only decades later that they started to be used more widely.
As Spence and Wainer argue, he can now rightly be called the “father of infographics”, and crucially, someone who transformed how we conceptualise change. “Today there is scarcely a field of human activity that does not make use of statistical charts,” they write. “The invention can lay fair claim to being one of the most versatile and useful tools for analyzing and displaying data in the sciences and humanities, in commerce and the arts, and in everyday activities that affect us all… There is no other form of human communication that more appropriately deserves the description ‘universal language’.”
Long-term lessons
Does Playfair’s story hold any lessons for the long-term thinker? Well, he could hardly be described as one himself, not least because he got into so much trouble pursuing short-sighted, get-rich-quick schemes that landed him in trouble with the law.
However, there are a couple of lessons I would draw out from his story. Firstly, that the messenger matters. It’s possible that if Playfair had not been so widely disliked – if he had been more respected and lauded within British society – then his proposals would have been embraced earlier. Sometimes a great insight can be disregarded because of who made it. Those campaigning for the long view might therefore take note of who their messengers are. It certainly doesn’t mean respectability is paramount, but like it or not, the person carrying an idea is important if you want it to land.
Second, not all good ideas emerge disruptively fast. Playfair didn’t live to see how much his graphical innovations would shape the world. Some ideas don’t change everything overnight; they take decades to bed in. Those of us who would like to see our societies embrace a longer view therefore need patience – and also to accept that we ourselves might not live to see all the changes we want. The upside of this dynamic, however, is that it means some world-changing ideas are already here: they just need to be found and spread.
Finally, a question more than an insight. If Playfair could invent a whole new way of visualising the long-term, what other graphical techniques might we use? Could there be approaches that have yet to be thought of, or embraced? To that end, I’m collecting examples of “long infographics” and other visual techniques for a future post…do let me know if you would recommend any that are worth sharing.
This month’s long-terminology
“Non-use”
I recently wrote a piece for BBC Future about “the environmental case for buying a coal mine”. I spoke to economists, campaigners and legal scholars about why it could be a good idea for climate-concerned organisations and governments to buy inexpensive coal mines and drilling rights: in short, to keep the stuff locked in the ground. They argue that anyone should be able to buy such “non-use rights”… but as I discovered, there are a number of legal and commercial barriers in the way, one of which dates back more than a century to the US frontier years.
Thanks very much for reading. You’re part of what is now a sizeable and engaged audience for The Long-termist’s Field Guide, and I’m really grateful for your interest. If you think someone you know might like to read it, please do pass it on directly or on social media.
best wishes,
Richard
Follow me @rifish on twitter, my website of writing, or @thelongtermist on instagram.
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