Pie charts didn't catch on until the middle of the 19th century, however. Then they were used in combinations with maps to convey additional data, and expanded in shapes to include rings and "doughnut" charts. (The food imagery even carries into many languages, such as French, where a pie chart is called le camembert after the wedges of cheese it resembles.) But it took a woman presenter, famous nurse and noted statistician Florence Nightingale, to advance the pie chart in the uses for which we know it today. From the New York Times article:
|Nightingale's pie charts|
Florence Nightingale drove home the impact of poor sanitary conditions on mortality rates during the Crimean War by reconfiguring a pie chart, varying the length, rather than the width, of the wedges, so that the graph resembled a cock’s comb. As the historian Hugh Small notes, Nightingale may not have invented statistical graphs, but “she may have been the first to use them for persuading people of the need for change.”You'll see few pie charts in scientific papers, as they are not considered ideal for many scientific displays. In fact, Nightingale's design improves upon the original in a way that was much later confirmed by research at AT&T Bell Laboratories, showing that comparison by angle is less accurate than comparison by length, something her design incorporates into the pie chart.
I asked readers on The Eloquent Woman on Facebook to guess which famous woman helped advance the pie chart, and Emily Dust Nimsakont was first out of the box with the correct answer. She wins a set of The Eloquent Woman's magnetic poetry. Congratulations, Emily!