An early attempt to plot empires, dynasties and public figures across centuries on a single timeline, and a direct ancestor of the Gantt and timeline charts used in project tools today.
Joseph Priestley is remembered today mostly as a chemist, but he was also an early and influential figure in the history of data visualization. His "Chart of Biography," published a few years earlier, plotted the lifespans of roughly 2,000 notable historical figures along a single timeline — the length of each line showing how long they lived, relative to when.
A New Chart of History extended the idea to civilizations rather than individuals: empires, dynasties and states are drawn as bands running left to right across nearly 3,000 years, positioned vertically by region, so a reader can see at a glance which empires overlapped, which rose as others fell, and how long each endured.
The chart was widely reproduced and imitated in the decades that followed, and its basic logic — position encodes time, length encodes duration — is the same logic behind the modern Gantt chart and most project timeline tools in use today.
Vis Lab’s own research-timeline and project-history visualizations lean on that same simple, centuries-old idea: sometimes a single horizontal axis is still the clearest way to show how things unfolded.
Featured in Vis Lab's overview of landmark visualizations that shaped the field.
