Establishing, in a Broadway office building, control methods for quicker "tum-arounds" of eighty-five ships chartered by the Belgian Relief Commission had little relation to strategy in the president's office of a steel company with twenty thousand employees in Pittsburgh, or scheduling, at New Haven, Connecticut, two thousand tool makers scattered in shops throughout New England to assist in producing the light Browning machine gun by a company already working twenty-two thousand employees at the New Haven plant. During that period "Z" chart methods and unit card curve records were

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Signature of William Piayfair from a Letter to Thomas Jefferson Dated March 20, 1791

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GRAPHIC PRESENTATION

developed for use in fields much more specialized than would be of interest here. Also short map pins with spherical heads were created and placed on a quantity production basis. Through all the research of the World War period, the need was constantly evident for standardization so that graphic charts could be made and interpreted without possibility of misunderstanding. For general use, graphic charts must be simple. It is not, however, always easy to determine what is the utmost simplicity. Much depends on the method of approach. A semi-logarithmic chart may not be puzzling if you call it a ratio chart and make no mention of mathematics.

Since the close of the World War, other activities have crowded into the background my interest in graphic charts and human reactions to them. It was impossible, however, to resist tearing from magazines and newspapers thousands of examples of particularly interesting or especially erratic graphic charts. These were added to examples which had come, in what Hollywood would call "fan mail," from readers of Graphic Methods. As recently as twenty months ago there was still no expectation of my ever writing another book on the subject.