Design
Is This the Oldest-Ever 3D Map of Transit Ridership?
The Germans built it with colored wooden sticks around 1913.
Forget GIS: All one needs to make a fascinating 3D map of ridership data is a pile of sticks, as German transit geeks proved more than a century ago.
Fine, perhaps you'd also need surgeon-steady hands and unlimited patience to assemble this 8-by-8 foot masterpiece of data visualization, which to judge from the photo caption dates from around 1913. The current state or whereabouts of the map is unknown, but it lives on in the pages of Graphic Methods for Presenting Facts, a 1914 tome by Willard C. Brinton. (Credit for unearthing it goes to Dataphys.org, and for sharing it Moritz Stefaner and Eric Fischer.)