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

by Simon Winchester

All the Herculean labours that were involved in the mapping of the imagined underside of an entire country were accomplished not by an army or a legion or a committee or a team, but by the lone individual who finally put his signature to the completed document: William Smith, then forty-six years old, the orphaned son of the village blacksmith from the unsung hamlet of Churchill in Oxfordshire.

Smith had little enough going for him: he was of simple yeoman stock, more or less self-taught, stubborn and visionary, highly motivated, single-minded. Although he had to suffer the most horrendous frustrations during the long making of the map, he never once gave up, nor even thought of doing so. And yet very soon after the map was made, he became ruined, completely.

Ironically and cruelly, part of the reason for his humiliation lies behind another set of faded velvet curtains that hangs near by, on another of Burlington House’s many elaborate staircases. There, it turns out, is quite another map, made and published shortly after William Smith’s. It was in all essentials a copy, made by rivals, and it was made, if not expressly but then at least in part, with the intention of ruining the reputation of this great and unsung pioneer from Oxfordshire – a man who was not gently born, and so who was compelled, like so many others in those times, to bear the ungenerous consequences of his class.

founding father of the whole new science of English geology, a science that remains at the core of intellectual effort to this day.

1769.* Watt, Wedgwood and Arkwright – a holy trinity from the brave new world – were now unknowingly ushering in the man who would change the view of that world for all time.

In all corners of the industrial world there was change, development, innovation, the shock of the new. Coal, iron, ships, pottery, cloth, steam – these were the mantras of the moment. The great English iron-masters, for example, were approaching their zenith: Cranage, Smeaton and Cort were developing the processes for purifying iron by ‘puddling’ and rolling molten metal. Abraham Darby and John Wilkinson were constructing the first iron bridges in the world. Wilkinson, unarguably the greatest of all eighteenth-century champions of things ferrous, who made the first mine railway in 1767, then the first iron chapel (for a congregation of Wesleyans), was using iron lighters to shift coal to his three furnaces (and, to cap it all, had himself buried in 1808 in an iron coffin).

But he saw the rocks, he made a deduction – and he then took that deduction to its logical and, as we shall see, astonishingly beautiful conclusion.

He had no intention of announcing his ideas to Samborne Palmer and Richard Perkins. He would not in fact for the moment disclose his theories to anyone. He was still not wholly certain he was right, and he had no intention of blurting out an unformed set of ideas, thereby making a fool of himself. Nor did he want to claim as his own notions that might rightly belong to others – and yet at the same time he hoped against all hope that he had originated these ideas, that he truly was the first to think them.

Their world that had seemed so stable for so long was now changing all too rapidly, and men like Palmer and Perkins only half understood what was happening. They might have recognized in their strange companion what some of today’s middle-aged recognize in the young electronics visionaries: that Smith was a man who, though part of their world, still had a view that was somehow much larger than theirs, that he had firm sight of a future that he somehow knew was better, as well as being a future that was definably different and, most crucially, utterly unlike the world of the present. Smith knew that he stood on the edge of something; and that knowledge, that certainty, set him apart, and made more ordinary men uneasy.

William Smith was to make still more history during that fateful year. Mary Anning may have been born that year, Vesuvius may have been erupting, the French Revolution may have been ending. But at No. 29 Great Pulteney Street in Bath, on the cool evening of Tuesday, 11 June 1799, history was being made at a small dinner party. There were only three guests – the Reverend Joseph Townsend, the Reverend Benjamin Richardson and Smith – the ‘triumvirate’, as one historian was later to say, three of the leading players in the heroic age of geology. As the party drew to a close, Smith is reported to have stood up, by invitation, and dictated to his host a document that is still regarded as one of the classics in the annals of science.

For the first time the earth had a provable history, a written record that paid no heed or obeisance to religious teaching and dogma, that declared its independence from the kind of faith that is no more than the blind acceptance of absurdity. A science – an elemental, basic science that would in due course allow mankind to exploit the almost limitless treasures of the underworld – had now at last broken free from the age-old constraints of doctrine and canonical instruction.

Each time a new oilfield is opened, or new gold is added to a reserve, or when more platinum or cerium or iron or manganese is won from the earth’s crust, it is perhaps appropriate to remember these three men.

But at the same time the argument shows once again the degree to which Smith felt he was being overlooked and shunned by those in society who were reckoned to be more gentlemanly than himself. The Board of Agriculture, for example, was composed of grand landowning men; their President, Sir John Sinclair, though ostensibly a friend of Smith, was an indefatigable Scottish aristocrat,

In the case of his relations with John Farey, though, the situation was later helped when Farey too was to feel the crushing weight of English snobbery – most notably being denied membership of the newly formed Geological Society, because he was merely the son of a farmer.

The man who would try to mediate this dispute, and who would at first do his level best to accelerate Smith’s progress in making his new map, was the then President of London’s distinguished Royal Society, the influential and far-seeing botanist, Sir Joseph Banks.

They walked out within the hour, leaving Smith with the firm impression that he could expect neither help nor sustenance from the new-formed Society, nor would they ever invite him for membership. The meeting convinced Smith that rigid class distinction lurked deep within the very science of which he was a practitioner – ‘the theory of geology is in the possession of one class of men, the practice in another’.

No matter that he was not a member of the Society and had never been invited to be, or that just nine years beforehand his membership was blackballed by Greenough’s old guard. No matter that he was low-born, that he was uneducated, a provincial, a convicted debtor and that even more contemptible of figures, a practical man. No matter that he had accused some of the more august members of the geological establishment of stealing his work, of cheating him of his due. No matter that a quarter of a century’s worth of ill-feeling had accumulated, that factions existed and battled among themselves, and that the kingdom’s entire geological universe had been upset. Now, the wise men decreed, was the time for atonement and reconciliation.

The Father of English Geology…

In 1838 a four-man committee was established – Barry, Henry de la Beche, an architect named Charles Smith and, with his brand-new honorific, Doctor William Smith. The committee was charged with the express purpose of selecting the stone that was to be used in the construction of the giant new edifice.