Talk:William Playfair

Playfair's barchart

Is there any way to get a better series of scans of his work? These current ones are very grainy and, as in the pie chart one, the colors are nearly nonexistent. 68.39.174.238 (talk) 17:51, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Sorry. It is the first bar chart ever created in history, and I am glad we even have a picture. -- Marcel Douwe Dekker (talk) 21:07, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

If the book still existed, I suspect a better scan could be taken (DARN my library doesn't have any of his works!). 68.39.174.238 (talk) 19:53, 30 August 2008 (UTC)

Several Playfair graphs are reproduced in David Bellhouse's The Flawed Genius of William Playfair including the pie chart (p. 199). The book is available in electronic format. According to WorldCat, more than 160 libraries worldwide have electronic versions of the book as of 4 April 2024. Provided that you have access to one of these libraries, any chapter can be downloaded in pdf format and you can obtain a copy of the desired graph in that way. 67.68.60.195 (talk) 11:30, 4 April 2024 (UTC)

No Mention whatsoever of Playfair's lifelong history of fraud?

Would anyone want to add this information? Its widely available and astounding that this article has no mention of this man's fraudulent activities, he defrauded almost every business tie he had in the UK at one point or another. He was a genius, but not a good person by any means, so its quite odd this article has no mention of this. At present this article is highly slanted. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 192.225.125.201 (talk) 23:31, 13 December 2019 (UTC)

Playfair was involved in a number of scams. These are described in David Bellhouse's book The Flawed Genius of William Playfair: The Story of the Father of Statistical Graphics. 69.158.188.73 (talk) 21:07, 8 December 2023 (UTC)