The late nineteenth century was a kind of golden age of data visualization. In 1869 Charles Minard made his famous chart showing the dwindling of Napoleon’s army on its path into Russia and its subsequent retreat, often called the greatest data graphic ever made; this, in turn, was a descendant of Florence Nightingale’s cox-comb graph† showing in stark visual terms that most of the British soldiers lost in the Crimean War had been killed by infections, not Russians.
