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.

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.

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.

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.

"Amazonia," from 2015, illustrates the three types of rainforests and their ecosystems in lush detail.

"The World of Flowers," from 1968, shows exactly that: native flora, throughout the world.

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.

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.

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.