Gallery: National Geographic’s Classic Infographics, Now in One Stunning Book
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*National Geographic Infographics*, from Taschen, catalogs some of the magazine's best data visualizations. This one, from 1963, charts all of the Society's expeditions thus far. They had made 201, starting in Alaska.
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In 1981, *National Geographic* published an up-to-speed account of advances in airplane technology. You can trace improvements from the Wright Brothers to the Boeing Dreamliner.
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These drawings, from 1920, show various species of hawks used in falconry, as well as the lexicon used by falconers to describe different parts of a bird.
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Skiing dates back to a peat bog in Russia that's been carbon-dated to 8,000 years ago. This map, from 2013, charts the history of skis from there.
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"Amazonia," from 2015, illustrates the three types of rainforests and their ecosystems in lush detail.
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"The World of Flowers," from 1968, shows exactly that: native flora, throughout the world.
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In 2013, for instance, a team of British explorers took a laser scanner into China’s supercaves. A century ago, those explorers would have had to measure each stalagmite and stalactite, and hand over pages of handwritten numbers to an artist. Today, a machine can cut through the subterranean darkness to measure a cave’s interior with incredible accuracy.
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Information graphics can show readers spaces that cameras cannot reach—such as the interior of the Columbia Spacelab. This cutaway is from 1983 and shows the interior of a lab made for a 10-day mission, by NASA and the ESA.
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Humans sleep for nearly one-third of their lives, yet sleep remains somewhat scientifically mysterious. The known elements—REM, the role of the ventrolateral preoptic nucleus cells, and so on—gets charted here.
