---
title: Wheat and wages
description: William Playfair compared the price of wheat with a mechanic's wages over two centuries.
styles: [hand-drawn]
title_image:
  src: https://images.unsplash.com/photo-1593455071238-92dd081a39b1?crop=entropy&cs=tinysrgb&fit=max&fm=jpg&ixid=M3wxMTE0NDQ4fDB8MXxhbGx8fHx8fHx8fHwxNzk0MjQ3MjMwfA&ixlib=rb-4.1.0&q=80&w=1080
  alt: "Golden grain in a field"
  caption: "Golden grain in a field."
  fit: cover
  width: 1080
  height: 432
  credit:
    author: "Sarah Mason"
    author_url: https://unsplash.com/@sarahthemason?utm_source=daniel-ai-skills&utm_medium=referral
    source: Unsplash
    source_url: https://unsplash.com/photos/brown-grass-field-during-daytime-cUY7u2Fskk4?utm_source=daniel-ai-skills&utm_medium=referral
---

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.

```chart
type: combo
title: Wheat and a mechanic's weekly wage
subtitle: Shillings, selected observations from 1565 to 1805
data: { csv: data/selected.csv }
encoding: { x: year, y: wheat, line: wages }
axes:
  x: { label: Year }
  y: { label: Wheat per quarter, unit: s }
  y2: { label: Weekly wage, unit: s }
style: { gaps: break, ratio: '16:9' }
```

*Source: William Playfair, A Letter on Our Agricultural Distresses (1821), [Wheat dataset](https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/doc/HistData/Wheat.html) 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.

```chart
type: bar
title: Preventable disease dominated the first winter
data: { csv: data/nightingale.csv }
encoding: { x: month, y: rate, color: cause, facet: period }
stack: true
axes:
  y: { label: 'Annualized deaths per 1,000' }
```

*Source: Florence Nightingale's [Crimean War mortality data](https://vincentarelbundock.github.io/Rdatasets/doc/HistData/Nightingale.html), via HistData. Rates are annualized deaths per 1,000 soldiers, not monthly death counts; the periods run April to March.*