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

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

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

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

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Overview

From the author of the bestselling The Professor and the Madman comes the fascinating story of William Smith, the orphaned son of an English country blacksmith, who became obsessed with creating the world's first geological map and ultimately became the father of modern geology.

In 1793 William Smith, a canal digger, made a startling discovery that was to turn the fledgling science of the history of the earth — and a central plank of established Christian religion — on its head. He noticed that the rocks he was excavating were arranged in layers; more important, he could see quite clearly that the fossils found in one layer were very different from those found in another. And out of that realization came an epiphany: that by following the fossils, one could trace layers of rocks as they dipped and rose and fell — clear across England and, indeed, clear across the world. Determined to publish his discovery by creating a map that would display the hidden underside of England, he spent twenty years traveling the length and breadth of the kingdom by stagecoach and on foot, studying rock outcrops and fossils, piecing together the image of this unseen universe.

In 1815 he published his epochal beautiful hand-painted map, more than eight feet tall and six feet wide. But four years after its triumphant publication, and with his young wife going steadily mad to the point of nymphomania, Smith ended up in debtors' prison, a victim of plagiarism, swindled out of his recognition and his profits. He left London for the north of England and remained homeless for ten long years as he searched for work. It wasn't until 1831, when his employer, a sympathetic nobleman, brought him into contact with the Geological Society of London — which had earlier denied him a fellowship — that at last this quiet genius was showered with the honors long overdue him. He was summoned south to receive the society's highest award, and King William IV offered him a lifetime pension.

The Map That Changed the World is, at its foundation, a tale of endurance and achievement, of one man's dedication in the face of ruin and homelessness. The world's coal and oil industry, its gold mining, its highway systems, and its railroad routes were all derived entirely from the creation of Smith's first map.; and with a keen eye and thoughtful detail, Simon Winchester unfolds the poignant sacrifice behind this world-changing discovery.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780061767906
Publisher: HarperCollins
Publication date: 04/28/2009
Series: P.S. Series
Pages: 368
Sales rank: 131,161
Product dimensions: 5.31(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

About The Author
Simon Winchester is the acclaimed author of many books, including The Professor and the Madman, The Men Who United the States, The Map That Changed the World, The Man Who Loved China, A Crack in the Edge of the World, and Krakatoa, all of which were New York Times bestsellers and appeared on numerous best and notable lists. In 2006, Winchester was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) by Her Majesty the Queen. He resides in western Massachusetts.

Hometown:

New York; Massachusetts; Scotland

Date of Birth:

September 28, 1944

Place of Birth:

London, England

Education:

M.A., St. Catherine¿s College, Oxford, 1966

Read an Excerpt

Escape on the Northbound Stage

The last day of August 1819, a Tuesday, dawned gray, showery, and refreshingly cool in London, promising a welcome end to a weeklong spell of close and muggy weather that seemed to have put all the capital's citizens in a nettlesome, liverish mood.

Anyone trying to hurry along the cobbled and granite-paved streets that day was still certain to be frustrated, despite the improvement in the weather: The crowds! The crush! The dirt! The smell! More than a million people had lately been counted as living within and beyond London's city walls, and each day hundreds more, the morning papers reported, were to be found streaming in from the countryside, bent on joining the new prosperity that all hoped might soon be flowering now that the European wars were over. The city's population was well on the way to doubling itself in less than twenty years. The streets were in consequence filled with a jostling, pullulating, dawdling mass of people. And animals, too: It seemed of little matter to some farmers that there had long been laws to keep them from driving cattle through the center of town - so among the throngs one could spot mangy-looking sheep, more than a few head of cattle, the odd black pig, and of course horses, countless horses, pulling carriages and goods vehicles alike. The stench of their leavings, on a hot week such as this had been, was barely tolerable.

Since it was very early in the morning, there were, of course, fewer crowds than usual. Fewer, that is, except in one or two more notorious spots, where a sad and shabby ritual of the dawn tended to bring out the throngs - and where this story is most appropriately introduced.

The better known of the London sites where the morning masses gathered was in the rabbit warren of lanes that lay near Saint Paul's Cathedral, to the east of where the river Fleet had once run. Halfway along the Fleet Market a passerby would have noted, perhaps with the wry amusement of the metropolitan sophisticate, that crowds had gathered outside a rather noble, high-walled building whose address, according to a written inscription above the tall gateway, was simple: Number Nine.

An onlooker would have been amused because the address was a mere euphemism, the building's real purpose only too well known. The streets to the west of Saint Paul's were one of the two districts of nineteenth-century London where a clutch of the capital's many prisons were concentrated: the Newgate, the Bridewell, the Cold Bath Fields, and the Ludgate jails had all been built nearby, in what in winter were the chill gloom and coal-smoke fogs of the river valley. And Number Nine was the site of the best known of them all, the prince of prisons, the Fleet.

There was another, precisely similar, ghetto of prisons on the south side of the Thames, in the area that, then technically beyond London, was the borough of Southwark: another small huddle of grim, high-walled mansion houses of punishment and restraint - the Clink, the Marshalsea, the Bedlam prison-hospital, and, formidable in appearance and reputation, just like its sister establishment back at Number Nine, the infamous barrackslike monstrosity of the Prison of the King's Bench.

The King's Bench, the nearby Marshalsea, and the Fleet were different from most London prisons. They were very old, for a start, and were privately run according to a set of very strange rituals. They had been instituted for a sole purpose - the holding, for as long as necessary, of men and women who could not or would not pay their bills. These three institutions were debtors' prisons - and the reason that crowds formed around their entrances each sunrise is that, every morning just after dawn, it was the policy of their wardens to free those inmates who had discharged their obligations.

Of the three the Fleet had the most intriguing entranceway. On either side of the gate was a caged window, and above it the motto "Remember the Poor Debtors, Having No Allowance." Through the grate could be seen a small and gloomy chamber, with nothing inside except a wooden bench. A doorway beyond, locked and barred from the outside, gave access to the main cellblock. Each day a new impoverished prisoner would be pushed out into the cage - to spend the next twenty-four hours on begging duty, pleading with passersby for money to help in his or her plight. Debtors were obliged to pay for their time in prison; those who turned out to be totally out of funds were forced to go into the grated room and beg.

The crowds outside the Fleet and the King's Bench prisons on that cool August Tuesday morning, and that so interrupted the progress of men of affairs on their ways along the granite setts with which the road in Southwark and Saint Paul's had recently been paved, were there to see a spectacle. Tourists came to the jails to see the beggars; the merely curious - as well as the small press of family and friends (and perhaps some still-unsatisfied creditors) - came to greet with amiable good cheer the small group of inmates who each day would emerge, blinking, into the morning sunlight.

According to the prison records, one of the half dozen prisoners who stepped free from behind the high walls of the King's Bench Prison on that Tuesday morning was a sturdy-looking yeoman whose papers showed him to have come from Oxfordshire, sixty miles west of London. Those few portraits painted of him in his later years, together with a single silhouette fashioned when he was in his dotage, and a bust sculpted in marble more than twenty years later, show him to be somewhat thickset, balding, with a weatherbeaten face...

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Exclusive Author Essay
Ten miles to the south of where I came to write this book stands the cold and windswept farmhouse where George Orwell wrote his appropriately bleak masterpiece, 1984. Ten miles to the north of me is the modest cottage, regularly staked out by reporters from London tabloid newspapers, where Princess Diana's mother has come to live. And so there was a kind of literary logic, my friends imagined, in my choosing to come up to write in a cottage on this small and lonely island off the west coast of Scotland: Pinioned with a fine equidistance between, on the one hand, a memorial to the rigors of classic literature and, on the other, to the more notorious writing practices of Fleet Street, thus might I be inspired, these friends suggested, and have a chance of making a new book that was both lively and lasting, a homage to both ends of the spectrum of our craft.

But in fact my friends were quite wrong. Though on a clear day I can (if I stand on a chair in my study and peer through the dormer) just make out the peninsula on Jura where stands the farmhouse of Barnhill, Orwell's spectral presence had nothing to do with my choosing to come to what the local Post Office insists be properly described as "the Isle of Luing, by Oban, Argyll." I chose this place in part simply for its peace and beauty; but in large measure I chose it -- because I was going to write a book about a geological map -- for its geological associations, not for its literary ones, however powerful and siren-like they might be.

Choosing to come to somewhere in Britain to write about geology made good sense anyway, it seemed to me. The British Isles are unique, so far as I know, in one crucial geological respect. Thanks to a series of lucky accidents over hundreds of millions of years, every single one of the time zones of the earth's history happen to be represented on the ground in Britain, scattered in outcrops of rock across the thousand miles or so that lie between Cornwall and the Shetland Islands. No other country -- not even the giants, like America or Canada or Russia -- can lay claim to possessing everything -- everything from the two-billion-year-old iron-hard rocks of the distant Precambrian right up to the soft formations of later Quaternary, which were laid down as recently as the last Ice Age.

No other country can display fossils of the entire range of life forms, from the single-celled smudges newly precipitated from the primeval oceans, through the most complex forms of the Hollywood-friendly Jurassic, right up to recognizable species that are the obviously immediate antecedents of today's living creatures. It just so happens that the entire array of the earth's ancient history and of life's ancient history is on permanent display on the cliffs and riverbanks and mountainsides of Britain -- making the country the ideal place, symbolically, in which to write a book about the beginnings of this most elemental of sciences. (Some pedants will say there is very little of the era known as the Miocene to be found in Britain, but the Miocene is an age of staggering geological dullness, and so, quite frankly, who cares? There's plenty of it over in Germany, if one insists on wanting to look at it.)

But then why, my friends would ask, if all Britain is so geologically congenial, come all the way up to Scotland? Why suffer the gales and the sea mists and the long winter nights and the clouds of summertime midges? Why not at least settle in a part of Britain that is postcard-lovely, covered with meadows and cattle and churches and villages? Why not be comfortable where you write?

Well, it is precisely the covering of loveliness -- a covering that renders all the underlying rocks invisible, swathed in their pretty countryside -- that is the problem. Up in western Scotland there is none of this softening, nothing to hide the realms that lie below. In Scotland the rocks are all there, exposed to the sky, rough and ready, rubbed bare and raw -- the pure geology of the nation is in full view, all the time. When I was at university nearly all of our field trips came to Scotland -- to Arran, to Mull, to Ardnamurchan, to Skye -- and we were taken there precisely because the rocks there were so visible, all ready to be examined, gazed at, hammered, understood.

And so I decided I would come to write this book about an unknown and unsung man on the equally unknown and unsung Isle of Luing, by Oban, Argyll. I now have rocks of all kinds, fossils of all kinds, eternally on view out of my windows. I gaze at gneiss, I breakfast looking at sandstone, I take tea looking at cliffs of ancient slate, I dine by granite. Geology surrounds me: The world is here stripped bare, a constant reminder, a marinade, of what I'm writing about. And if the distant influences of George Orwell and Fleet Street are in the air and in the mix as well, so be it. Rocks, literature, and journalism: For this one book and for much else besides, the perfect combination, the perfect place. (Simon Winchester)

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