William Playfair

William Playfair (1759 to 1823) was a Scottish engineer and political economist, and the founder of graphical methods of statistics. He was born in Scotland as the fourth son of the Reverend James Playfair, and his brothers included the architect James Playfair and the mathematician John Playfair. After an apprenticeship with the inventor Andrew Meikle he became an engine erector, draftsman and personal assistant to James Watt at the Boulton and Watt steam engine manufactory in Soho, Birmingham, and later worked in turn as a silversmith, merchant, banker, economist, pamphleteer, translator and journalist. In 1786 he introduced the line, area and bar chart of economic data, and in 1801 he published what were likely the first pie chart and circle graph, which show part-whole relations. He lived in Paris at the time of the storming of the Bastille and escaped to London in 1793. He has been reported to have been a secret agent for the British Government, although this is sometimes disputed.