Photo by Sarah Mason on Unsplash
Wheat and wages
William Playfair compared the price of wheat with a mechanic's wages over two centuries.
In 1821 William Playfair used bars and a line to put wheat prices beside weekly wages. The axes have different scales: compare the changes, not the heights of the marks.
Wheat and a mechanic's weekly wage
Shillings, selected observations from 1565 to 1805
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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.
Nightingale’s second year
Florence Nightingale used mortality statistics to argue for sanitary reform. Compare the monthly annualized death rates across two periods. These stacked bars retain the rates; they are a modern replot, rather than a reproduction of her area-proportional polar diagram.
Preventable disease dominated the first winter
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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.