We might think of data science as a relatively new field, but in fact people have been collecting and interpreting data for thousands of years. Here are just some of the fascinating nuggets of information I found out when I took a look at the history of analytics.
- The first census of which we have surviving records (in the form of clay tablets) was carried out by the ancient Babylonians in around 3800 BC – it was used to work out how much food was needed for each person.
- Although in the UK we often talk about the wettest summer/highest temperature/coldest day ‘since records began’, that just refers to the point at which the Met Office took over official record-keeping responsibilities in 1914 – the longest continuous record of temperature is the Central England Temperature series, which goes back to 1659.
- A line graph of 1644 is thought to be the first ever visualization of statistical data – the Flemish astronomer Michael Florent van Langren used it to show various astronomers’ estimates of the longitudinal difference between Rome and Toledo.
- The first known pie charts were published in 1801 in William Playfair’s The Statistical Breviary – some scholars believe that Playfair himself hand-coloured the charts in every copy, to save on printing costs.
- Florence Nightingale was a pioneer not just in healthcare reform, but also in the use of innovative data visualizations to support her campaigns for reform – these included honeycomb density plots to illustrate overcrowding in army camps, and a polar area diagram showing the causes of soldiers’ death for each month of the year.
- That mainstay of the BBC election-night coverage, the Swingometer, is a perfect reflection of evolution in data visualization technologies – it started life as a simple cardboard prop in the 1950s, became colour at the 1970 general election (when it had to be hastily extended due to a greater than expected swing to the Conservatives), and is now a 3D virtual-reality construct.
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