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The breath-takingly broadly talented Joesph Preistley left us much– not least, Alyson Foster explains, a then-new way of understanding history…

It’s a testament to the wide-ranging and unconventional nature of Joseph Priestley’s mind that no one has settled on a term to sum up exactly what he was. The eighteenth-century British polymath has been described as, among other things, a historian, a chemist, an educator, a philosopher, a theologian, and a political radical who became, for a period of time, the most despised person in England. Priestley’s many contradictions—as a rationalist Unitarian millenarian, as a mild-mannered controversialist, as a thinker who was both ahead of his time and behind it—have provided endless fodder for the historians who have debated the precise nature of his legacy and his place among his fellow Enlightenment intellectuals. But his contributions—however they are categorized—have continued to live on in subtle and surprisingly enduring ways, more than two hundred years after his death, at the age of seventy, in rural Pennsylvania.

Take, for example, A Chart of Biography, which is considered to be the first modern timeline. This unusual, and unusually beautiful, pedagogical tool, which was published by Priestley in 1765, while he was in his thirties and working as a tutor at an academy in Warrington, England, tends to get lost in the shuffle of Priestley’s more notable achievements—his seminal 1761 textbook on language, The Rudiments of English Grammar, say, or his discovery of nine gases, including oxygen, 13 years later. But the chart, along with its companion, A New Chart of History, which Priestley published four years later, has become a curious subject of interest among data visualization aficionados who have analyzed its revolutionary design in academic papers and added it to Internet lists of notable infographics. Recently, both charts have become the focus of an NEH-supported digital humanities project, Chronographics: The Time Charts of Joseph Priestley, produced by scholars at the University of Oregon. 

Even those of us ignorant of (or uninterested in) infographics can look at the painstakingly detailed Chart of Biography for a moment or two and appreciate how it has become a source of fascination. The two-foot-by-three-foot, pastel-striped paper scroll—which contains the meticulously inscribed names of approximately 2,000 poets, artists, statesmen, and other famous historical figures dating back three millennia—is visually striking, combining a formal, somewhat ornate eighteenth-century aesthetic with the precise organization of a schematic. Every single one of the chart’s subjects is grouped vertically into one of six occupational categories, then plotted out chronologically along a horizonal line divided into ten-year increments. Despite the huge quantity of information it contains, it is extremely user-friendly. Any one of Priestley’s history students could run his eye across the chart and immediately gain a sense of the temporal lay of the land. Who came first: Copernicus or Newton? How many centuries separate Genghis Khan from Joan of Arc? Which artists were working during the reign of Henry VIII? The chart was a masterful blend of form and function…

The most significant design feature of Priestley’s chart—as historians point out—was the way in which he linked units of time to units of distance on the page, similar to the way a cartographer uses scale when creating a map. (The artist Pietro Lorenzetti lived two hundred years before Titian and thus is situated twice as far from Titian as Jan van Eyck, who predated Titian by about a century.) If this innovation is hard for contemporary viewers to fully appreciate, it’s probably because Priestley’s representation of time has become a convention that’s used everywhere in visual design and seems so obvious it’s now taken for granted.

To Priestley’s contemporaries, though, who were accustomed to cumbersome Eusebian-style [see here] chronological tables or the visually striking but often obscure “stream charts” created by the era’s chronographers, Priestley’s method of capturing time on the page revealed something revelatory and new—a way of seeing historical patterns and connections that would have otherwise remained hidden. “To many readers,” wrote Daniel Rosenberg and Anthony Grafton in their book, Cartographies of Time, Priestley’s Chart of Biography offered a never-before-seen “picture of time itself.”  

It was no wonder, then, that eighteenth-century readers found themselves drawn to it. A Chart of Biography sold well in both England and the United States, accruing many fans along the way. Along with the New Chart of History, it would go on to be printed in at least 19 editions and spawn numerous imitations, including one by Priestley’s future friend Thomas Jefferson, who developed his own “time chart” of market seasons in Washington, and the historian David Ramsay, who acknowledged Priestley’s influence in his Historical and Biographical Chart of the United States. The time charts marked Priestley’s first major commercial success and played a key role in establishing his reputation as a serious intellectual, earning him an honorary degree from the University of Edinburgh, and helping him secure a fellowship nomination to the Royal Society of London.

As much as anything he published, and he published a staggering amount—somewhere between 150 and 200 books, articles, papers, and pamphlets—Priestley’s time charts encapsulate his uniqueness as a thinker. Of his many intellectual gifts, his gift for synthesis—for knitting together the seemingly disparate things that caught his attention—might have been his greatest… 

Read on for how Priestley went on to become the most controversial man in England: “Joseph Priestley Created Revolutionary ‘Maps’ of Time,” by @alysonafoster in @humanitiesmag from @NEHgov.

More info on the Chart– and magnified views– here.

* John Tukey

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As we celebrate constructive charts, we might spare a thought for Edward Lorenz, a mathematician and meteorologist, best remembered as a pioneer of Chaos Theory; he died on this date in 2008. Having noticed that his computer weather simulation gave wildly different results from even tiny changes in the input data, he began investigating a phenomenon that he famously outlined in a 1963 paper— and that came to be known as the “butterfly effect,” that the flap of a butterfly’s wings could ultimately determine the weather thousands of miles away and days later… generalized in Chaos Theory to state that “slightly differing initial states can evolve into considerably different [later] states.”

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