New Developments in Seal Raid of Bin Laden's Compound: The New Yorker

Charles Joseph Minard

Minard was a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics. He is famous for his Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813, a flow map published in 1869 on the subject of Napoleon's disastrous Russian Campaign of 1812. The graph displays several variables:

• the army's location and direction, showing where units split off and rejoined
• the declining size of the army (note e.g. the crossing of the Berezina River on the retreat)
• the low temperatures during the retreat.

This map using pie charts represents the cattle sent from all around France for consumption in  Paris (1858).

Charles Joseph Minard was a master of using simple sizes to indicate relationships.  In this map, as with his famous chart of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Minard expertly relates the volume of tonnage shipped through European ports and on European rivers to the size of the lines and circles representing them.


Source