The Royal Statistical Society’s History of Statistics Section hosted a webinar by Prof David Bellhouse of the University of Western Ontario (emeritus) on 8 July 2024. The lecture was attended by nearly 30 participants and was chaired by Dr Chaitra H Nagaraja. The talk was based on his recent book,
The Flawed Genius of William Playfair: The Story of the Father of Statistical Graphics.
Bellhouse began by showing a series of Playfair’s graphs in chronological order, interweaving his graphical innovations (like the bar graph), life story, and motivations. For example, he showed how Playfair’s graphical style reflected his work as a draughtsman and that his choice of topics demonstrated his concern about the national debt and worries that England was in decline. Bellhouse called this mix, “Playfair’s propaganda.”
Bellhouse also called into question the claim posited by author Bruce Berkowitz,
Playfair: The True Story of the British Secret Agent Who Changed How We See the World (2018), that Playfair was a spy. Bellhouse noted that there was no clear proof of this claim, referencing historical material from various archives which ought to contain mentioned of Playfair’s intelligence activity.
Questions from the audience included queries about Playfair’s impact and/or from non-Western societies (his main impact was in France); the invention of the pie chart; and weighing the artistry with the scientific content when constructing graphs.
The webinar was recorded by the RSS and is available on
YouTube.