The History of Information Graphics

Lesson 7
- dots, lines and bars

Preludes

Early concepts of coordinates

Eratosthenes of Cyrene (276BC–196BC) - latitude-longitude

Anonymous -  De cursu per zodiacum, appendix to Macrobius' commentary to Cicero's Sloemnis Scipionis, ca. 950

Nicole Oresme (1325–1382) - Latitude of forms (proto bar charts), ca. 1350

Johannes Stabius (1450–1522) - Astrolabium Imperatorum, 1515, Vienna, Albertina

Graphs

Pierre de Fermat

René Descartes

Frans van Schooten

La Géometrie
1637

Michael van Langren - the first abstract statistical graph, 1644

Robert Plot - History of the Weather - Barometric pressure in Oxford for the year 1684. Philosophical Transactions 1685 No. 169

Nicolaus Cruquius - Observationes Accuratae Captae, 1724

Athanasius Kircher? 

Philippe Buache - The Water Levels of the Seine, 1770

Christian Gottlieb Poetzsch - Thousand years of floods, 1784

Charles de Fourcroy, 1782

August Wilhelm Crome, 1785

William Playfair, 1786, 1789, 1801

William Playfair, 1786, 1789, 1801

19. century

Charles-Joseph Minard, stacked "area" chart, 1825

Charles-Joseph Minard, stacked bar chart, 1844

Stepped line graph

André-Michel Guerry, histogram and polar chart, 1829

William Farr, rose diagram, 1852

Florence Nightingale's rose/polar chart, 1858