A brief history of infographics

- [Narrator] While the popularity of infographics is a relatively recent phenomenon, infographics have been around for a long time. Let's take a look at some landmarks in the history of infographics. In 1857, English nurse Florence Nightingale used infographics to lobby for better conditions in military hospitals. She used a Coxcomb chart, a combination of stacked, bar, and pie charts to depict the number and causes of deaths during each month of the Crimean War. In 1861, French civil engineer Charles Joseph Minard created an infographic depicting Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow in 1812. He showed changing variables that contributed to Napoleon's failure: the army's direction as they traveled, the locations that the troops passed through, the size of the army as troops died from hunger and wounds, and the freezing temperatures they experienced. In 1900, civil rights campaigner W.E.B. Du Bois created a series of infographics to humanize the African American experience. Between 1925 and 1934, the Social and Economic Museum of Vienna developed the Isotype, or International System of Typographic Picture Education. Otto Neurath was the museum's founding director. Gerd Arntz was the artist responsible for creating the graphics. The aim of the Isotypes was to represent social facts pictorially and to bring statistics to life by making them visually attractive and memorable. One of the museum's catchphrases was, "To remember simplified pictures "is better than to forget accurate figures." An important principle of Isotype is that greater quantities are represented by a greater number of the same size pictogram rather than by an enlarged pictogram. In Neurath's view, variation in size does not allow accurate comparison, whereas repeated pictograms can be counted, if necessary. In 1933, Harry Beck created a map for the London Underground, an updated version of which is still in use today. Inspired by an electrical circuit diagram, Beck's radical idea was to space the stations equally rather than based on geography. He believed that passengers were more interested in how to get from one station to another and where to change trains than in geographical accuracy. In 1972, Otl Aicher created a set of pictograms for the Munich Olympics that featured stylized human figures. These infographics popularized the use of stick figures for public signage.