Charles Joseph Minard and the Art of Infographics.
On October 24 1870 French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard passed away. He is best noted for his ground breaking inventions in the field of information graphics. Charles Joseph Minard was born on March 27 1781 in Dijon, France as the son of Pierre Etienne Minard, a clerk of the court and an officer of the secondary school and Benign Lame lady. He was baptized at Saint Michel on the day of his birth. At age four Minard learned to read and to write, and when he was six his father enrolled him an elementary course in anatomy. He completed his fourth year of study at the secondary school at Dijon early, and then applied himself to studying Latin literature and physical and math sciences. At age 15, he was admitted to the prestigious École Polytechnique where among his professors among others Lagrange. Fourier a profound impression on him . He left there in order to study civil engineering École nationale des ponts et chaussées (the School of Bridges and Roads). In September 1810 he was sent by the government to Anvers and then almost immediately to the port of Flessingue. There, he solved a critical problem with a cofferdam that was leaking water faster than it could be removed. He solved the problem by using pumps driven by a steam engine, only the third time this solution had been applied to a project. He worked for many years as a civil engineer on the construction of dams, canals and bridge projects throughout Europe. On November 1 1830 he was named superintendent of the School of Bridges and Roads, where he continued to serve through 1836. While there he was awarded the cross of the Legion of Honor. He then became inspector of the Corps of Bridges until he retired in 1851 after which he dedicated himself to private research. Minard a pioneer of the use of graphics in engineering and statistics. He first began to publish cartes figuratives (figurative maps) during the mid-1840s, when he was nearly sixty-five years old. Most of his early maps dealt with flows of goods and passengers along railroad, river and oceangoing routes of commerce. Minard's maps became renowned around France not so much for their statistical or cartographic merits, but for the style he used in visualizing the numerical and relational aspects of flows. . He is most well known for his famous cartographic depiction of numerical data on a map of of Napoleon's disastrous losses suffered during the Russian campaign of 1812 (Carte figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l'Armée Française dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813). The illustration is perhaps the single best-known statistical graphic of the nineteenth century and depicts Napoleon's army departing the Polish-Russian border. A thick band illustrates the size of his army at specific geographic points during their advance and retreat. It displays six types of data in two dimensions the number of Napoleon's troops . This type of band graph for illustration of flows was later named Sankey diagram. At yovisto you can learn more about the visualization of statistical data in the famous TED-talk of Prof. Hans Rosling on 'Let my dataset change your mindset'.