Show HN: Minard's map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Minard's map of Napoleon's invasion of Russia

dmmh.dclure.org

49 pointsclured13 comments

Charles Minard [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Joseph_Minard] contributed amazing work to several fields, information graphics most notably.

  Charles Minard's map of Napoleon's disastrous Russian campaign of 1812. 
  The graphic is notable for its representation in two dimensions of six types of 
  data: the number of Napoleon's troops; distance; temperature; the latitude 
  and longitude; direction of travel; and location relative to specific dates.

Fantastic work. Thank you. It's great to see in-situ.

Tufte wrote a ton about this map for those interested: http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/minard

What is the y-axis supposed to represent in the graph? Not to nitpick, but a y-axis title would be helpful.

EDIT: I assume it represents Napoleon's army. If so, that spike in December is interesting, and presumably represents reinforcements?

You can mouse over a point on either the map or the graph to highlight the corresponding point on the other. Based on that, the spike in late November appears to represent the main army rejoining a group that split off during the outbound march.

As you can see in this graph, Napoleon split up his army and left a small part behind while he walked towards Moscow. It's the remainings from this smaller army that represents this spike

It's a map, not a graph so there is no y-axis. The colored area represents the size of the army with the gold area being March to Moscow and the black being the retreat. There were two small groups that split from the main thrust. The black are them rejoining the retreat. As you can see you were luck if you were in one of those two groups since they did not get decimated.

See http://www.masswerk.at/minard for a translation of the map's original legend (mouseover). There wasn't just a single movement of the army, but several troops were detached or left behind and rejoined later in the campaign. There's also a bit of a simplification in the map, as was pointed out by Minard, in order to provide the bigger picture of the events in the flow chart.

It would be interesting to know more about the logistics of running a mobile army in that era. I'd guess it would be hard work even to get hold of adequate maps for the regions you might decide to move into. Even with maps, you'd still face problems of trying to predict where food would be available as you moved forward.

What do these rectangles mean?

There are lot of different looking maps of this war in Internet, a random one: http://img-fotki.yandex.ru/get/6214/33778531.0/0_733c6_77420...

The rectangles represent the number of men on Napoleon's Grand Army during his march on, and subsequent retreat from, Moscow.

Worth to notice that Napoleon lost most of the army in August and September. He expected plenty of food during harvest season, not the scorched-earth tactics.

Fascinating! Nice to see it in both an overlay and in a sense of time.

This is cool as heck, thanks.

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