Reading 5: History of Bar Charts and Graphs

Today bar charts and graphs are used everywhere and there are many forms and variations, but where
invented them and where did they come from?

Many sources credit William Playfair (circa 1780) with inventing the bar chart, however a
Frenchman, Nicole Oresme used a bar chart in a 14th century publication, "The Latitude of Forms", to
plot velocity of a constantly accelerating object against time. Those of you who studied physics will
know that Sir Isaac Newton is accredited with first writing down the laws of motion, however it's
interesting to note that here some 300 years before Newton, someone else had a grasp of velocity and
acceleration. In this very early graph Nicole plots time along the horizontal axis and velocity of an
object along the vertical axis. The length of the bar represents the velocity of the object at each
moment in time. Although taken for granted it's important to note that each bar is of equal width and
this feature has remained as one of the fundamental rules of most forms of bar type graphs to this very
day.

In 1765 Joseph Priestley published a

timeline type graph upon which he
plotted horizontal bars. Although not one
of the more usual forms it is still a bar
style chart.
Moving on 20 years and we finally get to
William Playfair who again utilised bar
charts in his publication to show
imports/exports of Scotland. This is the
first example of numerical data being
split into discrete groups and plotted as
bars and hence the reason William is
credited with the invention of the bar
chart.

Joseph Priestley’s graph

Imports and exports of Scotland – William

Mayfair
Today bar charts and graphs are easy for us to incorporate into all sorts of publications both physical
and digital. There is a variety of software available which enables almost anyone to create bar charts
from a set of numbers. Below is a modern example where a 3D bar chart is used to compare
Profit/Loss for 3 products by Quarter. Individual sales data is rolled up into discrete periods of time,
in this case Quarters, and the total figure plotted as the height of each bar.