Graphical Methods Pre‐20th Century

Despite their utility for analyzing and presenting data, the use of graphs in science is a relatively late development and their emergence through history has been uneven and contested. Modern statistical graphics date largely to the pioneering work of William Playfair in the late eighteenth century. The gradual spread of graphical methods in the early nineteenth century was slowed by various antigraph prejudices, but eventually culminated in their enthusiastic reception during the second half of that century. During the Golden Age of graphics, graphs were used extensively in fields ranging from demography to laboratory physiology. Hailed as the universal language of science, graphs underwent a proliferation of novel formats, and they figured crucially in a number of scientific discoveries. The behavioral scientists of that period – including many of psychology's founding figures – made sophisticated applications of graphical methods, but such methods would be eclipsed by the rise of inferential statistics in the behavioral sciences after 1900. Keywords: Playfair; Karl Pearson; Galton; line graphs; histograms; ogives