#youknowiloveachart “Playfair was a kind of Forrest Gump of the Enlightenment, rubbing shoulders with the era’s many giants, switching careers at the drop of a hat, and throwing himself headlong into history-changing events, from the storming of the Bastille to the settling of the American West.” When he wasn’t blackmailing lords and being sued for libel, William Playfair invented the pie chart, the bar graph, and the line graph.