Is a picture worth a thousand words?

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I was chided by a reader on Friday for posting only a link to a picture without enough words.  I had thought that the picture of Dutch tulip fields spoke for itself.  Indeed, is not a picture worth a thousand words?  We are certainly told that it is.  So then I started wondering what the origin of this phrase was.  Internet to the rescue!

First I was delighted to find that the phrase was anticipated by by a character in Ivan S. Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, 1862:

“This drawing shows me at one glance what might be spread over ten pages of a book.”

I say delighted because back in college I vividly remember visiting the great wooden secretary in my parents’ bedroom and pulling down that gem of a story about inter-generational relationships from my own father’s library. It seemed so relevant to the 1960’s/1970’s.

Credit for the actual phrase is usually given to newspaper editor Arthur Brisbane who in a 1911 article describing newspapers and advertising wrote:

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.”

In a 1913 advertisement for the Piqua Auto Supply we find the phrase:

“One Look Is Worth A Thousand Words”

By 1927 in an article in the trade journal “Printers Ink,” by Frederick R. Barnard an ad by Barnard states: 

“One Picture Worth Ten Thousand Words,”

where it is labeled a Chinese proverb. The phrase had undergone word inflation and appealed to the popular “Confuscius say…,” which he did not.

By this point we are stuck by the question is it worth a thousand or ten thousand words? Computer scientist  John McCarthy has made the inverse point:

“As the Chinese say, 1001 words is worth more than a picture.”

The origins of the phrase in the history of print points to its fundamental meaning.  We have spoken extensively in this blog to the explosion of information over the internet and the sheer volume of meaning that we need to absorb each day.  What the phrase continues, a century after it was first penned and set into type, is the fundamental point that visualization enables us to absorb information far more rapidly and far more voluminously than the written word. This presumed brevity is an apparently contradiction.  It takes so many more bytes of information to create a picture than text.  So if the currency of information is gigabytes then this is a false economy.  However, if you want to get your meaning across, if you want to avoid confusing your audience, put in a picture.