Lines, Bars and Circles: How William Playfair Invented Graphs by Helaine Becker

Lines, Bars and Circles tells the story of the eccentric William Playfair. 

William Playfair was a dreamer with an annoying sense of humor. When his father died, Will's education was taken over by his older brother John who moved back to the family home near Dundee, Scotland. William liked to play practical jokes, but with John as his teacher he soon became and excellent mathematician like his brother.

A dreamer, Will found himself restless and left home when he was fourteen with the intention of making his fortune. He found a job with Andrew Meikle, an inventor. But he left this job after a few years to become an assistant to James Watt.

This new position inspired William to try to dream up his own inventions, but this made him make mistakes on the job.He soon left Watt and decided to start his own business using a machine he developed. This machine made objects out of silver and William opened a shop to sell them. The shop failed.

Undeterred, William tried many different ventures, writing, making cannon parts for the British army and starting a bank. Sometimes his schemes got him in to trouble with the law.

In spite of all this, William continued writing and his books earned him a living. For one of those books, he needed something to show the information he was trying to portray. He created the first line graph to do this. The line graph made it easier to see what the data. King Louis XVI was impressed by Williams graphs and he rewarded him with a royal permit.William wanted to use this permit to "build a steam-powered rolling mill that would manufacture all kinds of objects out of steel." But before he could do this, Louis was overthrown.

Because of his bad reputation, scientists refused to endorse William's graphs. Instead, it would be almost one hundred years before they were rediscovered.

Discussion

Lines, Bars and Circles gives readers a fun and engaging treatment of the life of William Playfair who is credited with developing line and bar graphs as well as the pie chart. Illustrator Marie-Eve Tremblay's digitally created artwork adds humour to this telling of what might be a somewhat dry subject for children.

William was born on September 22, 1759 to Reverend James Playfair, a minister in Liff, Scotland. His father died in 1772 when William was twelve-years-old. This meant his older brother John had to care for William and his younger and older brothers. John would go on to become a respected scientist,  Professor of Natural Philosophy, Mathematics and Geology at Edinburgh University. 

After completing his schooling, William undertook an apprenticeship with the inventor of the threshing machine, Andrew Meikle. He then became the personal assistant and draftsman for the illustrious James Watt at Boulton & Watt in Birmingham in 1777. After this, William began the first of several business ventures over the years, most of which, would fail. 

In 1787, he moved to France to try to make his fortune there. He was involved in numerous "adventures" in revolutionary Paris, eventually fleeing France for Germany in 1791. He returned to London where he started a bank which also failed. William then earned his living as a political and economic writer. It was in these writings that he began to make his points with the use of line graphs and bar charts. These illustrations had never been used before. His Commercial and Political Atlas, published in 1786 was the first demonstration of these new techniques. The first pie charts were used in his 1801 Statistical Breviary.

As Becker writes in her note on William Playfair, "More About William and His Charts", William's ideas were lost for almost a hundred years partly because of his reputation as a "scoundrel". During the time period he lived, a person's reputation was very important and William's was not good. Becker's light-hearted text along with Tremblay's modern, funny illustrations make for an interesting read. 

Lines, Bars and Circles is a welcome addition to a suite of picture books that have been written in the last few years on mathematical concepts. This picture book could be used to give students some context to one of the most important mathematical tools we use today to portray data in an understandable form. It's helpful for students to understand how specific mathematical tools such as line graphs and pie charts were developed. Even better if it is done in a way that makes math fun!

Book Details:

Lines, Bars and Circles by Helaine Becker
Toronto: Kids Can Press   2017