wheat

Playfair's wheat prices and wages from 1565–1820

As noted by in this protovis example, "In an 1822 letter to Parliament, William Playfair, a Scottish engineer who is often credited as the founder of statistical graphics, published an elegant chart on the price of wheat. It plots 250 years of prices alongside weekly wages and the reigning monarch. He intended to demonstrate that:

'never at any former period was wheat so cheap, in proportion to mechanical labour, as it is at the present time.'"

JSON 52 rows 3 fields 2.1 KB 12 gallery examples 12 examples

Fields

FieldTypeDistributionSummaryMissing
yearAdd integer 1,565 – 1,820 · mean 1,692 Missing 0
wheatAdd number 26 – 99 · mean 43.06 Missing 0
wagesAdd number 5 – 30 · mean 11.58 Missing 2 · 3.8%

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Pick two fields. Scroll to zoom, drag to pan. Both fields have values in 50 of 52 rows.Pick two fields. Both fields have values in 50 of 52 rows. Vega-Lite · input binding · scale bindingVega-Lite · input binding
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Preview

First 5 of 52 rows5 of 52 rows
yearwheatwages
1565415
1570455.05
1575425.08
1580495.12
158541.55.15

Examples

Vega and Vega-Lite examples open in the Editor with this dataset loaded. Altair examples link to their Python source.

Provenance

Source
License
File
data/wheat.json · 2,085 bytes · View on GitHub