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4 unusual facts about William Playfair


Howard Wainer

In 2007 he arranged for the publication of replica volumes of William Playfair's Atlas as well as his Statistical Breviary, the first books on the subject.

Scioto Company

The Scioto Land Company was organized by Colonel William Duer and others in 1787 and officially organized in 1789 as the Compagnie du Scioto in Paris by Joel Barlow, the agent of Duer and his associates abroad (William Playfair, an Englishman, plus six Frenchmen).

William Playfair

Ian Spence and Howard Wainer in 2001 describe Playfair as "engineer, political economist and scoundrel" while "Eminent Scotsmen" calls him an "ingenious mechanic and miscellaneous writer."

Two decades before Playfair's first achievements, in 1765 Joseph Priestley had created the innovation of the first timeline charts, in which individual bars were used to visualize the life span of a person, and the whole can be used to compare the life spans of multiple persons.


Kirknewton, West Lothian

The current house is a reworking of the original by the architect William Playfair for Alexander Maconochie, Lord Meadowbank in 1835.


see also