Tag: Twentieth century

• Every nuclear test, mapped

  

  Since 1945 eight countries have set off 2,055 nuclear tests. I mapped every one: 178 in 1962 alone, most of them underground after 1963, and 84% of all the explosive yield on islands.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Animated timeline, Asia, coast and sea, history, maps, Military history, Twentieth century, war, World, world maps

• The first websites: how the web spread around the world

  

  From one server at CERN in December 1990 to 83 countries with a recorded website by 2000. I coded Wikipedia’s list of 119 websites founded before 1995 and added 2,208 more from Wikidata: the web began with physicists and was soon overwhelmingly American, at least in the English-language memory of it.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Americas, Europe, history, Internet, Science and technology, technology, Twentieth century, Wikidata, World, world maps

• The Nobel brain drain: where laureates were born, and where they won

  

  I drew a line from birthplace to prize for 760 Nobel prizes in the sciences and economics. 31% went to someone working outside their birth country, the United States gained 131 more laureates than it grew, Germany’s share fell from 31% to 7% after 1933, and Japan became a late riser that keeps its laureates.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Birthplaces, Famous people, Flow map, history, Migration, population, Present day, Science and technology, technology, Twentieth century, Wikidata, World

• Drowned valleys: the villages flooded for reservoirs in the age of big dams

  

  From Capel Celyn to Mologa and the Lost Villages of the St Lawrence, I mapped the 100 places Wikipedia records as flooded by reservoirs. Most went under between 1930 and 1979, just as the world’s dam building peaked.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Britain, cities, landscape, Lost places, Rivers, Twentieth century, Wales, weather and climate, Wikidata, Wikipedia, World

• Pirate hotspots, then and now

  

  I mapped 7,511 pirate attacks from 1993 to 2020 and followed the hotspots as they moved, from the Strait of Malacca to Somalia and the Gulf of Guinea. In 2025 the busiest pirate waters were the Singapore Strait, and in 2026 Somali hijackers are back.

  Tristan Hotham

  Data stories, Games & other interests

  Africa, Asia, coast and sea, Crime and punishment, history, Present day, Ships and the sea, Twentieth century, war