This chart was created by Charles Minard in 1861. It has been called the best graph ever made. The chart describes Napoleon's ill-fated invasion of Russia in 1812. The orange lines shows the route to Moscow and the size of the army at each location. The black line represents the retreat from Moscow. On the bottom is temperature and time. That's place, size, and path of the army, date and temperature in one visual.
There are numerous examples of the chart online, but the best one, and source of this version, is by John Schneider. His version has been re-done to make all the entries legible.
York University has some interesting things to add. Here is a page of Minard's graph re-imagined in various ways. Here is a page dedicated to milestones in cartography and visualization. There is a lot of really fascinating stuff here.
