A surprising data visualisation pioneer: Florence Nightingale

Florence Nightingale is famous across the world for being the founder of modern nursing. You may well be familiar with stories of "The Lady with the Lamp" and her contributions to treating the sick and injured during the Crimean War. But what you may not know is that Florence was also a pioneer in using Data Visualisation to tell a story.

Born on 12th May 1820 into a rich upper-class British family, Florence spent most of her early years growing up at their lavish family estate in the South of England. She was highly educated by her father, something that was unusual for a girl at that time. From an early age, she demonstrated a gift for mathematics which would become extremely significant in later life.

At that time, young women from affluent English families were expected to dedicate their lives to becoming wives and mothers. Florence, however, felt that her future lay in helping others and in 1844 she announced to her family that she wished to become a nurse. Despite the anger and protests of her mother, she set about training herself in the art and science of nursing.

The origins of data visualisation: Michael van Langren

The Chinese philosopher Confucius is thought to have said "Study the past if you would define the future". Whilst I have no intention of defining the future of data visualisation, I certainly believe that looking at its origins, successes and failures can help us to better visualise data today.

It is fairly widely accepted that the first true data visualisation was made by the Dutch cartographer, mathematician and engineer Michael van Langren. Langren served as royal mathematician to King Philip IV of Spain, and became interested in one of the most important mathematical problems of the day - how to accurately determine longitude. Being able to determine longitude was hugely important for navigation, especially at sea. There were various methods used at the time but most were known to be estimations at best.

To demonstrate the wide difference in the estimations, in 1644 Langren published a simple, single dimensional chart to demonstrate the significance of the problem to the Spanish court.

Langren drawing for the Spanish court of 1644