Wheat and wages
William Playfair compared the price of wheat with a mechanic's wages over two centuries.
Take it apart
Download the Rich Markdown source and the data below into one folder. Each report keeps its own observations and source notes.
Credits
Source: William Playfair, A Letter on Our Agricultural Distresses (1821), Wheat dataset via the HistData R package. The chart selects every eighth observation with a known wage from the full dataset; prices are not inflation-adjusted.
Source: Florence Nightingale’s Crimean War mortality data, via HistData. Rates are annualized deaths per 1,000 soldiers, not monthly death counts; the periods run April to March.
Photograph: Sarah Mason, Unsplash photo and credit.