The Map That Changed The World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology

  • Simon Winchester
Viking: 2001. 338 pp. £12.99
Rocky representation: part of Smith's geological map of England and Wales. Credit: NATURAL HISTORY MUSEUM, LONDON

In 1797, William Smith, a surveyor and the orphaned son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith, produced the first list of the rock strata in the west of England; 1815 saw the publication of his geological map of England, the first of any country on a scale of five miles to the inch. Four years later Smith was in King's Bench Prison in Southwark for debt. And in 1831, nine years after his release, the Geological Society of London awarded Smith the first Wollaston Medal and he received a pension of £100 a year from King William IV.

But who today, outside the world of professional geology, has heard of this quintessentially English technical genius, a 'doer' rather than an intellectual? One reason is the lack of a modern biography of Smith. Simon Winchester now makes an honourable attempt to tell this remarkable story of scientific achievement against enormous odds: how Smith's great map was plagiarized, his financial failure and his belated recognition. The book will help to bring Smith the wider attention he deserves, as unsung heroes are in short supply. But there are considerable difficulties in writing a popular biography of a man such as Smith, difficulties that I suspect have deterred previous would-be authors.

There is little documentation on Smith's early years. Most of his professional life was spent trudging around the country surveying land, obsessively looking at rocks and making lists of the strata and their fossils — hardly the riveting stuff of popular biography. Smith did not write easily, although he did write a good deal, and his achievements are largely encapsulated in his beautiful and innovative geological maps. These were a huge technical achievement, but their niceties can be difficult for the uninitiated to appreciate. The problem for the biographer is to explain all this, to put it in a wider historical context and yet to retain the reader's interest.

In a popular account, Winchester cannot take background knowledge for granted. So he must provide potted explanations of the Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions, the social and economic environment of the time, and geology as a developing science with its plethora of characters, who must all be introduced. Inevitably, Smith barely figures in much of this, and yet he and his achievements have to be intruded as much as possible to keep the plot going.

Smith's public rehabilitation can be traced to the first volume of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830), the book Charles Darwin took on the Beagle voyage as his geological bible and in which Smith's achievement was first praised. The following year, Adam Sedgwick, president of the Geological Society, in his Wollaston Medal encomium for Smith, felt “compelled ... to perform this act of filial duty ... and to place our first honour on the brow of The Father of English Geology ... he that gave the plan, and laid the foundations, and erected a portion of the solid walls, by the unassisted labour of his hands”.

The title has stuck ever since. Winchester comments, “an injudicious hyperbole, some churlish few will say”. In one sense I join the ranks of the churls, in that I would like to know more about how and why the perception of Smith changed so radically within the predominantly middle-class membership of the Geological Society. On this, Winchester has little to say. Why exactly did grandees of the society such as Lyell promote Smith when they did? Was it perhaps to do with competing claims for innovation in geological mapping from abroad? These date back to Johann Lehmann's 1756 section of strata in the Harz mining region of Germany, Georg Füchsel's 1761 map of Thuringia and the 1811 map of Paris and its environs by Georges Cuvier and Alexandre Brongniart in France, which was directly inspired by Smith's work and by Sir Richard Griffith's work in Ireland. None of these names figure in Winchester's account.

What did Lyell, Sedgwick and the other bigwigs of the society really think of Smith? I am sure there are clues in their private correspondence. In acknowledging help from historians of science, Winchester admits that “this short book should be thought of simply as the hors d'oeuvre”. The chef for the main dish he is referring to is Hugh Torrens, a historian of geology who, according to Winchester, is also writing a biography of Smith. I hope that promise is fulfilled — Smith deserves it after all this time.