Greenland Trade (with) Exports & Imports to and from Bermudas.

William Playfair’s three editions of The Commercial and Political Atlas introduced an astonishing number of novel charting constructions that are still in common use today, including: The time series line graph. The divided surface area chart. The bar chart. Titles and textual descriptions. Chart fr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Playfair, William, 1759-1823
Format: Map
Language:unknown
Published: T. Burton 1801
Subjects:
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Summary:William Playfair’s three editions of The Commercial and Political Atlas introduced an astonishing number of novel charting constructions that are still in common use today, including: The time series line graph. The divided surface area chart. The bar chart. Titles and textual descriptions. Chart framing. Color coding. Hachure and stippled dots. Labeling of axes. Gridlines. Suppression of nonsignificant digits. Time period indicators. Event markers. Theoretical, hypothetical, and projected values. Solid and broken lines. Playfair’s 1786 Atlas was the first publicly available volume to contain charts, and it exhibits 43 variants of the time series line graph together with a solitary bar chart. Playfair issued a second edition, which was little changed, in 1787. There are much more substantial differences in the third edition. Instead of 40 plates containing 44 charts, there are 26 plates containing 31 charts. The most significant omission is the bar chart showing the exports and imports of Scotland. Two new charts were added. The first, in Plate 19, is a rather elaborate large area chart on a flyout showing the annual revenues of England and France as well as the interest on debt. The other new plate is not numbered, although it is given a figure of 26 in the index and referred to as Chart XXVI in the text. Adapted by RJ Andrews from the introduction to the republication of the Atlas (Cambridge University Press, 2005) by Howard Wainer and Ian Spence.