These are stone tablets from Mesopotamia, that show representation of tabulated data. This one in particular its first use was to measure finances. It was used by a Sumerian governor to survey the silver under his control.
Stone tablets from Mesopotamia
I was fascinated to learn what the oldest charts resembled, in my opinion they’re fairly highly detailed and a lot harder to distinguish what is being represented. I really admire how much work went into making these, and no charts today could be compared to them.
They learned from different scientific disciplines, where maps become more accurate by adding isolines and contours. More information was being shown in the data, introducing economic or social geography.
William Playfair was one of the first to use the line graph, the circle graph, the pier chart and the bar chart in visual representations.
Graph drawn on pre-printed graph paper
It was very interesting to find out who invented the various charts still used today, as this is something we take for granted and it’s something we consider that someone’s concept made it easier to represent data in many forms.
Playfair’s line graph and bar chart are clear and concise which made it accessible to read and understand compared to chart that were made before this era.
All types of charts were becoming popular, such as: histograms, scatter plots etc. to display any topic from economic data to weather data. William Smith was a Geologist, who created an entirely new information visualisation.
The railway and canal building industries began to build more complex representations of the transport networks. Minard, the French engineer developed maps to demonstrate why charging systems on the canal should be higher for partially completed journeys.
Map demonstrating why charging systems on the canal should be higher for partially completed journeys
This is a clever way to display data as you can clearly see the areas are higher in certain areas. Also, by including a key and a colour coding system it’s easily to tell apart each one effectively.