| Preface | p. xiii |
| Introduction | p. 1 |
| William Playfair and the Origins of Graphical Display | |
| Why Playfair? | p. 9 |
| All of the pieces were in place for the invention of statistical graphics long before Playfair was born. Why didn't anyone else invent them? Why did Playfair? | |
| Who Was Playfair? | p. 20 |
| Playfair (1759-1823) was an inventor and ardent advocate of statistical graphics Ian Spence Howard Wainer William | |
| Here we tell a bit about his life | |
| William Playfair | |
| A Daring Worthless Fellow 24 Ian Spence Howard Wainer | |
| Audacity was an important personality trait for the invention of graphics because the inventor had to move counter to the Cartesian approach to science | |
| We illustrate this quality in Playfair by describing his failed attempt to blackmail one of the richest lords of Great Britain | |
| Scaling the Heights (and Widths) 28 The message conveyed by a statistical graphic can be distorted by manipulating the aspect ratio, the ratio of a graph's width to its height | |
| Playfair deployed this ability in a masterly way, providing a guide to future display technology | |
| A Priestley View of International Currency Exchanges | p. 39 |
| A recent plot of the operating hours of international currency exchanges confuses matters terribly | |
| Why? We find that when we use a different graphical form, developed Joseph Priestley in 1765, the structure becomes clear | |
| We also learn how Priestley discovered the latent graphicacy in his (and our) audiences | |
| Tom's Veggies and the American Way | p. 44 |
| European intellectuals were not the only ones graphing data | |
| During a visit to Paris (and prompted by letters from, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson) learned of this invention and he later put it to a more practical use than the depiction of the life spans of heroes from classical antiquity | |
| The Graphical Inventions of Dubourg and Ferguson: Two Precursors to William Playfair | p. 47 |
| Although he developed the line chart independently, Priestley was not the first to do so | |
| The earliest seems to be the Parisian physician Jacques Barbeau-Dubourg (1709-1779), who created a wonderful graphical scroll in 1753 | |
| Graphical representation must have been in the air, for the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson (1723-1816) added his version of time lines to the mix in 1780 | |
| Winds across Europe: Francis Galton and the Graphic Discovery of Weather Patterns | p. 52 |
| In 1861, Francis Galton organized weather observatories throughout Western Europe to gather data in a standardized way | |
| He organized these data and presented them as a series of ninety-three maps and charts, from which he confirmed the existence of the anticyclonic movement of winds around a low-pressure zone | |
| Using Graphical Displays to Understand the Modern World | |
| A Graphical Investigation of the Scourge of Vietnam | p. 59 |
| During the Vietnam War, average SAT scores went down for those students who were not in the military | |
| In addition, the average ASVAB scores (the test used by the military to classify all members of the military) also declined | |
| This Lake Wobegon-like puzzle is solved graphically | |
| Two Mind-Bending Statistical Paradoxes | p. 63 |
| The odd phenomenon observed with test scores during the Vietnam War is not unusual | |
| We illustrate this seeming paradox with other instances, show how to avoid them, and then discuss an even subtler statistical pitfall that has entrapped many illustrious would-be data analysts. Ch | |
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