“The pie chart first appeared in 1801 in a publication entitled The Statistical Breviary by William Playfair. In this publication, Playfair used a variety of graphs to present geographical areas, populations, and revenues of European states. We have Playfair to thank for many of the popular graphs that we use today, including the bar graph. Although he didn’t invent the line graph, his innovative work popularized it as a means to display quantitative values across time…
The term “pie chart” was not coined until years later and it is not the only food metaphor that has been used to describe it. The French referred to it as using the name of their soft round cheese—camembert.”
(“Save the Pies for Dessert,” by Stephen Few. From The Visual Business Intellegence Newsletter, August 2007)
(via the New Shelton wet/dry, idroolinmysleep, laphamsquarterly and @brainpicker)
