This chart, devised in 1869 by French civil engineer Charles Minard, illustrates the disastrous toll suffered by Napoleon’s army on its foray into Russia in 1812. Yale political scientist Edward Tufte describes it in his 1983 book The Visual Dislay of Quantitative Information:

Beginning at the left on the Polish-Russian border near the Niemen River, the thick band shows the size of the army (422,000 men) as it invaded Russia in June 1812. The width of the band indicates the size of the army at each place on the map. In September, the army reached Moscow, which was by then sacked and deserted, with 100,00 men. The path of Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow is depicted by the darker, lower band, which is linked to a temperature scale and dates at the bottom of the chart. It was a bitterly cold winter, and many froze on the march out of Russia. As the graphic shows, the crossing of the Berezina River was a disaster, and the army finally struggled back into Poland with only 10,000 men remaining. Also shown are the movements of auxiliary troops, as they sought to protect the rear and the flank of the advancing army. Minard’s graphic tells a rich, coherent story with its multivariate data, far more enlightening that just a single number bouncing along over time. Six variable are plotted: the size of the army, its location on a two-dimensional surface, direction of the army’s movement, and temperature on various dates during the retreat from Moscow.

He concludes, “It may well be the best statistical graphic ever drawn.”

Predictions from British journalist John Langdon-Davies’ A Short History of the Future, 1936:

• “Democracy will be dead by 1950.”
• “There will be no war in western Europe for the next five years (from 1935).”
• “By 1960 work will be limited to three hours a day.”
• “Abundant new raw materials will [by 1960] make food, clothing and other necessities universally obtainable.”
• “By 1975 parents will have ceased to bring up their children in family units.”
• “By 1975 sexual feeling and marriage will have nothing to do with one another.”
• “Crime will be considered a disease after 1985 and will cease to exist by A.D. 2000.”
• “The high-brow art of our day will have no future save as a historic curiosity, since it has sacrificed everything to a misguided individualism.”
• “By A.D. 2000 every community will have adopted a planned birth-rate and population will be kept at a fixed level by state-controlled contraception, abortion and sterilization.”
• “England will have a population one-tenth of its present size.”
• “Large tracts of America will go back to the primeval wilderness.”
• “Mankind, like the social insects, will be divided into four or five different sexual types and will forget the he and the she in the needs of physiological and social division of labour.”

“The present can have no meaning unless it is to be found in the future,” he wrote, “so that our happiness and our efficiency as thinking beings depends upon the clarity with which we see what the future holds.”

To commemorate the defeat of the Spanish Armada, England struck a medal bearing the device of a fleet flying under full sail.

The inscription read Venit, vidit, fugit — “It came, it saw, it fled.”