This is the first of two historical chapters which are designed to put the political manipulation of statistics in its historical context. This chapter chases the word ‘statistics’ back to its origins in the late eighteenth century. When the word emerged in English, it carried a very different meaning than it does today. The original meaning referred to information about a state and its powers. Because states were starting to gather and publish information through censuses, the word came to stand for numerical information.

This chapter discusses more than the history of the word ‘statistics’. It it also portrays three pioneers of statistical information: Adolphe Quetelet, William Farr and Florence Nightingale. All three believed that numerical information was the key to social reform. Farr and Nightingale based their campaigns for sanitary living-conditions around statistical information about diseases and death rates. It would not have occurred to either Farr and Nightingale, or the politicians they dealt with, to manipulate the numbers. However, some of the preconditions for the manipulation of statistics were being set in place for later times.