
When Did Charts Become Popular? - Stratoscope
https://priceonomics.com/when-did-charts-become-popular/
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brudgers
The graph correlates with my first reactive speculation: graphs in newspapers
became more common with the publication of USA Today [first published 1982].
The inclusion of graphs was one of the its striking features -- liberal use of
color was another and vacuous reporting a third.

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dougmccune
As a lover of maps I also instinctively thought of USA Today. I can't locate a
source right now, but I remember reading that USA Today's multi-color, full
page weather map on the back was way ahead of its time, before any other
publications were dedicating that type of effort/cost/space to cartographic
data viz. It gave me a new appreciation for USA Today, which mostly I had
written off as "that free unread paper outside my hotel room door". But they
played a role in bringing beautiful maps to the masses.

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losteverything
Maps to the masses was also national geographic.

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zeta0134
Oh good. I expected to see a chart on the popularity of charts. I was not
disappointed.

I've got to imagine that printing the early charts on machines largely
designed to print text would have been _such_ a chore. But I don't know how
the printing presses really worked; I'm so used to today's computer driven
printing.

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Stratoscope
Once you see how the old printing presses worked, it's pretty clear why there
weren't many charts back then. Wikipedia has a pretty good article on it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Movable_type)

And this image search really tells a story:

[https://www.google.com/search?q=movable+type&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=movable+type&tbm=isch)

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kahirsch
But there was no problem in inserting graphics and, with offset printing,
photos into the page decades before charts became common.

Here's a page from 1933: [http://imgur.com/Mkzihb6](http://imgur.com/Mkzihb6)

But, before computers, the charts had to prepared by hand.

Also (unrelated to charts) the movable type was replaced with "hot type"
starting in 1886. Newspapers typesetters used a keyboard and the typesetting
machine automatically assembled the type molds and poured molten lead into
them, producing a slug for each line of type (hence Linotype).

[https://www.google.com/search?q=hot+type+slugs&tbm=isch](https://www.google.com/search?q=hot+type+slugs&tbm=isch)

The machines are pretty amazing:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wHiddZOfa8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wHiddZOfa8)

Here's a video about the last NY Times issue that was set using linotypes (in
1978): [https://vimeo.com/127605643](https://vimeo.com/127605643)

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showerst
Maybe I missed it, but I didn't see any discussion of the difficulty
typesetting or printing charts, beyond just creating them.

I imagine this had to pose a significant hurdle to early newspapers.

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ggus
This. Arranging words is already a hard, long, tedious task when you have to
pick every single small letter by hand (or using strange contraptions called
linotype).

Printing charts seems to be even more costly and time consuming.

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flukus
I had no idea how recent a phenomena this was, just part of life that gets
taken for granted. I had no idea my parents grew up in a world without charts.

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thekevan
It's almost as if they became more much more popular after an invention which
sat on your desktop and allowed you to create in minutes what would have taken
an artist hours.

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ams6110
Ross Perot's presidential campaign.

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blunte
This was my thought exactly. It really changed things in politics... for a
short while.

