Tag: retro

1913 public transport 3D map

Leafing through Brinton’s 1914 book ‘Graphic methods for presenting facts’ I found this example of a 3D map that has elements of a Sankey diagram.

This map (photo taken from an exhibit at a 1913 exhibition) shows passenger numbers on the Frankfurt streetcar lines (back then when trams were still called streetcars!)


Brinton explains that “we have a map presentation in which quantities are represented by building vertically above the various routes laid out on the map … made by strips of wood, alternately black and white, glued carefully above each one of the street-car routes. Each of the strips of wood represents 4,000 passengers carried on the street-car lines in 24 hours” (page 224).

The built up flows showing passenger numbers would, if laid sideways, indeed make a Sankey diagram. Building them up using the third map dimension avoids the issue of dealing with wide Sankey arrows in a dense city center, where passenger numbers are highest.

Brinton’s book, although over 105 years from its publication still makes for a great read (as does his 1939 book on ‘Graphic Presentation’, which is basically a sample book for doing infographics).

Misc Sankey Diagrams Uncommented 18

Back from a summer break … sorry for neglecting the blog for a couple of weeks. The FIFA Worldcup 2018 prediction from my last post has already become outdated … 😉

Here is a black and white hand drawn Sankey diagram from a doctoral thesis (Giovanni Angrisani:’Experimental and Simulative Analysis of a Micro Trigeneration System based on an Air Handling Unit with Desiccant Wheel’. Doctoral Thesis University of Naples, year unknown).


Instead of color-coded Sankey arrows the different types of energy are shown with different patterns of the arrow head. We can see some typical flaws: width of the arrow changes when going from horizontal to vertical (see ‘Losses 3.24 kW’ arrow branching out to the top), flows not to scale (compare ‘Losses 3.24 kW’ arrow to ‘Losses 6.25 kW’ arrow), overemphasis of some arrows through massive arrow heads.

A retro-style Sankey diagram from the times you would hand-draw such figures.