text: Around 1820, modern geography was established by Carl Ritter.   His maps included shared frames, agreed map legends, scales, repeatability, and fidelity. Such a map can be considered a "supersign" which combines sign systems—as defined by Charles Sanders Peirce—consisting of symbols, icons, indexes as representations.  Other examples can be seen in the works of geographers Ritter and Alexander von Humboldt.
  In 1857, English nurse Florence Nightingale used information graphics to persuade Queen Victoria to improve conditions in military hospitals.  The principal one she used was the Coxcomb chart, a combination of stacked bar and pie charts, depicting the number and causes of deaths during each month of the Crimean War.
  1861 saw the release of an influential information graphic on the subject of Napoleon's disastrous march on Moscow. The graphic's creator, Charles Joseph Minard, captured four different changing variables that contributed to Napoleon's downfall in a single two-dimensional image: the army's direction as they traveled, the location the troops passed through, the size of the army as troops died from hunger and wounds, and the freezing temperatures they experienced.
  James Joseph Sylvester introduced the term "graph" in 1878 in the scientific magazine Nature and published a set of diagrams showing the relationship between chemical bonds and mathematical properties. These were also some of the first mathematical graphs.