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:
“The principal office of history I take to be this: to prevent virtuous actions from being forgotten, and that evil words and deeds should fear an infamous reputation with posterity.”
—Tacitus (c. 55–c. 120)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)