The Eyes Have It

Blood, Dirt, and Nomograms: A Particular History of Graphs by Thomas L. Hankins.

“L. J. Henderson, a Harvard physiologist and the first president of the History of Science Society, attempted to analyze mammalian blood solely as a physical-chemical substance. He found that the only way he could describe a chemical system as complicated as blood was by a diagram called a “nomogram.” This lecture tells the history of Henderson’s nomogram and of nomograms in general. It describes the origins of graphs in the eighteenth century, their development in nineteenth-century engineering practice, and their importance in the twentieth century for describing physical and chemical systems.“

“A hundred and fifty years earlier he would not have been able to draw any kind of graph at all, unless he had had the imagination to create graphs for the first time. Graphs have become such an important tool for arranging and analyzing data that we can hardly conceive of a science getting along without them, and yet the entire Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century took place without graphs. Recent writings on representation go so far as to claim that what is new or different about modern science is the nature of its representations. If this is true, then the appearance of graphs and their subsequent elaboration throughout the nineteenth century must constitute, or at least accompany, a profound change in the way that scientists go about their business.“

[via grafyte]