History
The earliest known pie chart is generally credited to William Playfair's Statistical Breviary of 1801, in which two such graphs are used. This invention was not widely used at first; the French engineer Charles Joseph Minard was one of the first to use it in 1858, in particular in maps where he needs to add information in a third dimension. It has been said that Florence Nightingale invented it, though in fact she just popularised it and she was later assumed to have created it due to the obscurity of Playfair's creation.
-
One of William Playfair's pie charts in his Statistical Breviary, depicting the proportions of the Turkish Empire located in Asia, Europe and Africa before 1789.
-
Minard's map using pie charts to represent the cattle sent from all around France for consumption in Paris (1858).
Read more about this topic: Pie Chart
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Philosophy of science without history of science is empty; history of science without philosophy of science is blind.”
—Imre Lakatos (1922–1974)
“Throughout the history of commercial life nobody has ever quite liked the commission man. His function is too vague, his presence always seems one too many, his profit looks too easy, and even when you admit that he has a necessary function, you feel that this function is, as it were, a personification of something that in an ethical society would not need to exist. If people could deal with one another honestly, they would not need agents.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“Social history might be defined negatively as the history of a people with the politics left out.”
—G.M. (George Macaulay)