Coghlan, Timothy (1855–1926)

Abstract

Coghlan was the son of a poor family in Sydney, and obtained his education through scholarships. Like several other distinguished economists, his original career was in engineering, in this case civil engineering, which led to his taking an interest in statistics. New South Wales had been established as a penal colony under military rule, and therefore right from the colony’s beginning people and governments were accustomed to statistical enumeration much more thorough than in the rest of the world. Coghlan was appointed statistician by the colonial government, and produced over a long period of years a large output of excellent statistical papers.