Willard Cope Brinton

Willard Cope Brinton (December 22, 1880 – November 29, 1957) was an American consulting engineer, president of Brinton Associates, and information visualisation pioneer, particularly known for publication of the 1914 textbook on graphic methods, entitled Graphic methods for presenting facts.

Brinton was born in West Chester, Pennsylvania to Samuel Lewis and Elizabeth (Smith) Brinton. He received his BS in Mechanical engineering from Harvard University in 1907.

Brinton started his career as mechanical engineer working for various companies, and travelled through the United States, and to Europe, Japan and China. Back in New York he started his own consulting company. One of his notable works in the early 1920s was the proposal to initiate a bi-state New York harbor agency, which resulted in the creation of the Port of New York Authority. Brinton also designed production-control equipment for which he received several patents, and wrote two textbooks on graphic methods.

Brinton had become associate member of the ASME in 1907 and full member in 1912. In 1914 he became chairman of a new committee to develop standards for graphic presentation. He was director of the American Statistical Association in 1917 under the presidency of Allyn Abbott Young, and was elected as a Fellow of the American Statistical Association in 1922. He was president of the Harvard Engineering Society in 1932, and member of the Newcomen Society of the United States.

In the Preface of "Graphic methods for presenting facts," (1914) Brinton explained the intention of his work: