Who invented bar graphs

If we get down to the bare facts, one of the greatest thinkers and scientists of the Middle Ages, Nicole Oresme , used a bar chart more than years before Playfair, in his publication titled The Latitude of Forms 14th century.

Oresme decided to plot velocity of a constantly accelerating object against time, and here is what he drew:. He used individual horizontal bars to visualize the life span of a person and the whole chart to compare the life spans of multiple persons. Although it is more of a timeline chart, it can still be considered to be a bar chart, too. But what about William Playfair? Kids Can. ISBN Get Print.

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If you see something objectionable, please let us know. Once a comment has been flagged, a staff member will investigate. Document type :. And Playfair wasn't done. In his book The Statistical Breviary, he invented the pie chart. It appears in the middle of a group of other circular charts, and shows Turkish land holdings. Moreover, Playfair hand-colored the "slices" of the pie, thus initiating the idea of color-coding. Here's the overall page, followed by a close-up of the pie chart itself.

I suspect that the invention of the line graph, bar graph, and pie chart were--like so many inventions--something that would have been invented during this time frame by someone, and sooner rather than later.