Insight, Analytics and the New Marketing
The Best Graph Ever?
I am on vacation in Belgium this week to visit my family. Yesterday I took the train from Brussels to Antwerp, a commute I used to do daily when I worked in Brussels. I’d jump on in Antwerp and would usually have a seat. The 1st stop was Mechelen, where a big crowd would always get on – most of them would have to stand until most of us got of in Brussels.
The track between Mechelen and Brussels is the oldest on continental Europe – the tracks were laid in 1835. Charles Joseph Minard – a French engineer in charge of inspecting the bridges – studied the patterns in volume of passengers on the line. The hand-drawn graph above shows 3 maps he drew in 1843. The shaded bars show volume of passengers over the trajectory of the train to Brussels. He found out what I was still experiencing 150 years later – a lot of people getting on the train in Mechelen (Malines).
Minard went on to become one of the true greats in the early days of data visualization. His masterpiece “Carte Figurative des pertes successives en hommes de l’Armee Francaise dans la campagne de Russie 1812-1813” is considered by many (including Edward Tufte) to be the best statistical graphic ever (click here for a discussion on this subject on flowingdata.com : )
The graph depicts Napoleon’s disastrous military campaign in Russia in 1812-1813. The brown section of the graph shows the geographic movement of the French army towards Moscow on the far right. The black section shows the return. The thickness of the graph represents the number of troops left (every mm represents 6000 troops). On the bottom you can see the harsh temperatures of the Russian winter. This graph shows a lot of very chilling data in 1 picture. Only very few troops returned to France … .
Hey, have you seen this news article?
New details about Michael Jackson’s Death Emerge
I was wondering if you were going to blog about this…