Statistics / Demography Timeline Outline

The Plague of Justinian
(541 – 542)

More than One Million Charters Survive from the Period of Norman Rule in England
(1066 – 1307)

The Beginning of the Collection of Medical Statistics
(1592 – 1593)

The Earliest Known Graph of Statistical Data
(1644)

The Longest Series of Monthly Temperature Observations
(1659)

Demography & Vital Statistics
(1662)

The First Census in North America
(1666)

The Great Fire of London
(September 2 – September 5, 1666)

Political Arithmetick
(1690)

The Breslau Tables
(1693)

One of the Earliest Applications of Statistics to a Socio-Medical Problem
(1723)

Theory of Annuities
(1725)

Proving the Need for a Healthy and Industrious Population
(1742)

The First Correct Life Tables
(1746 – 1760)

The Earliest Formal Treatment of "Data-Processing"
(1755)

Bayes's Theorem
(1763)

Early Graphic Representation of Statistics
(1782)

Foundation of Statistical Graphics: the Line Chart and Bar Chart
(1785 – 1786)

The First U.S. Census
(August 2, 1790)

Discovery of the Method of Least Squares
(1795)

Malthus on Population
(1798)

The First Census of England, Scotland and Wales
(1801)

Invention of the Pie Chart
(1801)

First Publication of the Method of Least Squares
(1805)

Foundation of the Birth Control Movement
(1822)

The First Opinion Poll
(1824)

The "Average Man"
(1835)

Mathematical Model of a Continuously Growing Population
(1838)

The First of the Industrial Insurance Companies that Processed Immense Amounts of Data
(May 30, 1848)

Florence Nightingale's Rose Diagram
(1858 – January 1859)

Having Refused to Support Babbage, the British Government Pays for a Difference Engine Produced in Sweden
(1859)

The First Compilation of Baseball Statistics
(1860)

The First Instance of a Printing Calculator Used Extensively to do Original Work
(1864)

Possibly the Best Statistical Graphic Ever Drawn
(November 20, 1869)

Mathematical Study of Anthropological Data
(1871)

The First National Thematic Atlas
(1874)

300 Clerks Reviewing 2,500,000 Insurance Policies with 24 Calculators
(1877)

A Physician-Librarian Suggests the Idea for Electric Punched Card Tabulating
(1882)

Electromechanical Punched Card Tabulating
(1889)

Finger Prints as a Means of Identification
(1892)

The Automatic Punched Card Feed
(1900)

Hollerith Sells the Tabulating Machine Company to Flint
(1911)

The First National Opinion Poll?
(1916)

The First Publications on Statistical Quality Control in Manufacturing
(April 1930 – 1939)

Bradford's Law
(January 26, 1934)

The Social Security Program Creates a Giant Data-Processing Challenge
(1935 – 1936)

Communication Theory as a Statistical Problem
(1942)

Contract for Production of the UNIVAC
(1948)

Among the Earliest Extant Programs for a Stored-Program Computer
(March 15 – March 21, 1949)

The First Electronic Computer Commercially Manufactured in the United States
(March 31 – June 14, 1951)

The First "Large Scale" Application of Humanities Computing in the U. S.
(1959)

"Computational Analysis of Present-Day American English"
(1967)

The Digital Domesday Project--Doomed to Early Digital Obsolescence
(1984 – 1986)

"Death by Government" Statistics 1900-1987
(1994)

The Bureau of Labor Statistics Begins Publishing on its Website
(January 1995)

The First Intelligible Word from an Extinct South American Civilization?
(August 12, 2005)

Using Currency Movements to Predict the Spread of Infectious Disease
(January 26, 2006)

Statistical Analysis Correctly Forecasts the Election of Obama
(March 3, 2008)

China Becomes the Top User of the Internet
(January 14, 2009)

1.7 Billion Internet Users
(September 30, 2009)

Culturomics Introduced by the Cultural Observatory
(December 16, 2010)

What Makes Spoken Lines in Movies Memorable
(April 30, 2012)