William Playfair
He was, in turn, a millwright, engineer, draftsman, accountant, inventor, silversmith, merchant, investment broker, economist, statistician, pamphleteer, translator, publicist, land speculator, banker, ardent royalist, convict, editor, blackmailer and journalist.
[6] After returning to England, Playfair secretly provided support to the British government--specifically, Secretary of State for War Henry Dundas,[8] [9] Secretary at War William Windham,[10][11] and Permanent Undersecretary of State Evan Nepean[12][13] (the de facto chief of civilian intelligence)--pre-dating the formal establishment of the modern British intelligence establishment that would emerge in the 1900s.
[3] Ian Spence and Howard Wainer in 2001 describe Playfair as "engineer, political economist and scoundrel" while "Eminent Scotsmen" calls him an "ingenious mechanic and miscellaneous writer".
[14] It compares his career with the glorious one of his older brother John Playfair, the distinguished Edinburgh mathematics professor, and draws a moral about the importance of "steadiness and consistency of plan" as well as of "genius".
Bruce Berkowitz in 2018 provides a detailed portrait of Playfair as an "ambitious, audacious, and woefully imperfect British patriot" who undertook the "most complex covert operation anyone had ever conceived".
[15] In 1786 Playfair published what is thought to be the earliest statistical graphic--that is, a visual representation of the relationship of two or more variables)--in his Commercial and Political Atlas when he depicted in a line chart the balance of trade between England and other nations, using customs data.
[17] The idea of representing data as a series of bars had earlier (14th century) been published by Jacobus de Sancto Martino and attributed to Nicole Oresme.
At the time Playfair sought a means to represent the relative numbers of European, African, and Asian peoples within the Ottoman Empire.
[20][21] Its users included Thomas Jefferson, a proponent of a national system of statistics, and Alexander von Humboldt, often cited as a pioneer of modern geography.
[22][23][24] From 1809 until 1811, Playfair published the massive British Family Antiquity, Illustrative of the Origin and Progress of the Rank, Honours and Personal Merit of the Nobility of the United Kingdom.
[26] Though Playfair never told anyone about the operation, he alluded to it in a private letter to former Foreign Secretary and Prime Minister William Wyndham Grenville in 1811.
Playfair also provided a model of France's semaphore telegraph system in 1794 to the staff of the Duke of York, then commander of British forces in Flanders[28] and offered a Dutch-crewed ship to assist in quashing the foreign-inspired Nore mutiny against the Royal Navy in 1797.
