The Vienna philosopher behind the little people icons in modern infographics
Rows of identical stick figures standing for thousands of workers or homes now feel like an ordinary part of charts. They trace back to Otto Neurath, a Vienna Circle philosopher who hung a motto in his office: words divide, pictures unite. He called the system Isotype.
Neurath was born in Vienna in 1882, son of a noted economist, and took a Berlin doctorate in 1906 on how the ancients viewed trade and farming. During the First World War he ran the war ministry's economics department and later a war economy museum in Leipzig. Watching armies supplied by quantities of shells and food rather than money convinced him an economy could be planned in goods, without cash, a claim that provoked Ludwig von Mises's famous 1920 essay on socialist calculation. Jailed after the Bavarian Soviet Republic collapsed, he used the time to write a rebuttal of Spengler.
Back in Red Vienna he founded a museum of society and economy for a public drawn from a polyglot former empire. To make statistics readable without shared language, he worked with the illustrator Gerd Arntz and with Marie Reidemeister on a picture method in which each icon stood for a fixed quantity. First named the Vienna Method of Pictorial Statistics, it became the International System of Typographic Picture Education. He promoted it alongside Esperanto, though he insisted it was never a complete language.
He was also the chief author of the Vienna Circle's manifesto and the engine of the Unity of Science movement. Rejecting the idea that sentences mirror reality, he treated truth as coherence with the body of already accepted statements, testing the system as a whole. His image of sailors rebuilding their ship plank by plank at sea, never able to haul it into dry dock, was made famous by Quine.
Working in Moscow during Austria's 1934 civil war, he had arranged a coded telegram as a warning. When it arrived, reading that Carnap was waiting, he went to The Hague instead of home. After Rotterdam was bombed he and Reidemeister escaped to Britain in an open boat, were interned on the Isle of Man, married in 1941 and set up the Isotype Institute in Oxford. He died of a stroke in 1945; Marie carried the work on for decades.
Source: Otto Neurath
