I’ve been going through the pictures in a lot of old books lately, and the charts and diagrams are some of my favorite finds. Conventions at this time were unsettled, so people were trying all kinds of things. This one turns the US economy of 1882 into two stacked towers.

The left tower is spending inside the US. The right tower is foreign trade, with each block split into exports on the left and imports on the right. Cotton, for example, is $225M going out and only $2M coming in.

Does the chart work? Well, it’s not the easiest to parse as the perspective throws things off, and there’s no scale. But I do love that someone in the 1880s looked at these numbers and thought they should look like a monument.