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Description:

Playfair (1821) used a graph, showing parallel time-series of the price of wheat and the typical weekly wage for a "good mechanic" from 1565 to 1821 to argue that working men had never been as well-off in terms of purchasing power as they had become toward the end of this period.

His graph is a classic in the history of data visualization, but commits the sin of showing two non-commensurable Y variables on different axes. Scatterplots of wages vs. price or plots of ratios (e.g., wages/price) are in some ways better, but both of these ideas were unknown in 1821.

In this version, information on the reigns of British monarchs is provided in a separate data.frame, Wheat.monarch.

Variables:

Wheat A data frame with 53 observations on the following 3 variables.

Year

Year, in intervals of 5 from 1565 to 1821: a numeric vector

Wheat

Price of Wheat (Shillings/Quarter bushel): a numeric vector

Wages

Weekly wage (Shillings): a numeric vector

Wheat.monarchs A data frame with 12 observations on the following 4 variables.

name

Reigning monarch, a factor with levels Anne Charles I Charles II Cromwell Elizabeth George I George II George III George IV James I James II W&M

start

Starting year of reign, a numeric vector

end

Starting year of reign, a numeric vector

commonwealth

A binary variable indicating the period of the Commonwealth under Cromwell

Link To Google Sheets:

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References/Notes/Attributions:

Source

Playfair, W. (1821). Letter on our Agricultural Distresses, Their Causes and Remedies. London: W. Sams, 1821

Data values: originally digitized from http://datavis.ca/gallery/images/playfair-wheat1.gif now taken from http://mbostock.github.com/protovis/ex/wheat.js

References

Friendly, M. & Denis, D. (2005). The early origins and development of the scatterplot Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 41, 103-130.

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