CHARTS

• The history of visualisation
  

See the website of infovis- a project on information visualisation
see the book by Howard Wainer

Computer graphics are the result of the evolution traced in these texts.

•   Priestley and the visualisation of time

The first attempt to represent time in spatial form -a timeline- , in Priestley's Chart of Biography (1765). Priestley was a chemist.  The lives of the famous men of Antiquity are represented by lines parallel to the axis of centuries,  between the marker corresponding to the year of their birth and the one corresponding to their death.

• Playfair

William Playfair, who had been an associate of Boulton, invented charts

See the website on data visualisation for the 19th century.