William Playfair has been credited with inventing the line, bar, and pie charts. His time series plots are still presented as models of clarity. Playfair first published The Commercial and Political Atlas in 1786, in London. It contained 43 time series plots and one bar chart, a form apparently introduced in this work. It has been described as the first major work to contain statistical graphs. Playfair’s Statistical Breviary, published in London in 1801, contains what Tufte claims is the first pie chart.
