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

There are three types of people who may enjoy this book. First, those with an interest in 19th century English history who also know about the English countryside (have been to some of the places mentioned in the book). Second, anyone with a serious interest in geography since this is about one of the founding fathers. Third, anyone who is a Simon Winchester fan. I fall in to the last. Winchesters writing style is top notch as usual, but the truth is, this is not a very interesting person (at least in his personal life) and Simon goes to transparent lengths to hype up the perspective of "boy from the wrong side of the tracks shakes up the establishment", thus the many cries of hagiography. I've never been to England and could not relate with the plethoria of place names, and I have only a minor interest in geography so that aspect was interesting, but not exciting. If your reading this just because you are a Winchester fan, be warned you'll want to bring more.

The writing and the story get five stars from me. However, if you buy this second hand be sure to buy the hardback and not the paperback. The paper quality, print quality and feel are awful and cheap in the paper back.

The topic was interesting but the writing style is dense, grammatically complex with multiple parenthetical phrases in every sentence, digressions and even footnotes when 10 ideas refused to be shoehorned into a single sentence. Yes, I wrote that badly on purpose. Nearly every paragraph is a these or conclusion paragraph. None are just plain narrative. In other words, he summarizes what he is going to tell us and what he just told us without ever getting down the the business of actually telling us. And I LOVE geology. I love the people behind the science genre. But I never was able to finish this one. If it is your first book about an amateur scientist who is ahead of his time and faces contempt, you will enjoy it. But there are so many similar science stories that flow better. I enjoy some books with footnotes but usually, they are a bad sign. The book appears to be well-researched but the author spend more time trying to insert every marginally relevant fact than trying to tell and interesting story. (Disclosure: I wrote a book and was forced to choose between writing in this style for a publishing company or self publishing in Plain English. I chose to self publish. My audience was parents of sick children. I felt that clear, concise writing was vital.)

My sister-in-law loves geology. I had read Winchestor's book Krakatoa, so when she and my brother hosted me for a weekend, a book by Winchester was better than flowers for their hospitality. She hasn't read it yet, but I doubt that she will be disappointed. She doubts it, too.

Book review: “The map that changed the world” by Simon Winchester. Paperback, Penguin Books, 2002

This is the second book from this author that I’ve read. The first was “The madman and the professor”. I found that book really gripping and endlessly fascinating. The current book on my desk was interesting but not anywhere near as immediate and dramatic. It is still well researched and the narrative flows well. They are both true stories and both have their share of quirky characters, including the main ones.
In short the map that was created was the labor of a self taught man of the rocks, whose lonely first hand inventory of rock, sediment and fossil layers and the insights that came to him, rather quite early, provided the foundation for the new science of Geology. In an era where most Europeans still adhered to the literal measurement of the age of the earth in a derivative manner from the New and Old Testament, whose calculus suggested that the earth was literally about 6,000 years old. For some upstart rock enthusiast to come up with his own unique version of the earths age, before modern science had really emerged, including astronomy, before Darwin upset the religious minded who clung to a literalist interpretation, our hero was entering into a hornets nest and the backlash wasn’t long in coming. However, the good thing was that he had presented his ideas to men of science, men of boundless enthusiasm for discovering nature’s secrets. Had he shared his insights and discoveries inside the Church, say, the way Copernicus and Galileo did, we can be assured that his maps and papers would have gone up in flames and he would have been given a tour of the torture chambers under ground.
However, because what he found and annotated and charted was so accurate and the amounts of samples and physical evidence was so enormous, he more or less created new paradigms that withstood all criticisms and ignorant rejections. He suffered a lifetime of setbacks, which included many sad events that were the results of his own poor judgment. Marrying someone as far removed from being a suitable mate as possible, who ended up outliving him, and who was most likely mad as a hatter, was only one headache he had to live with. He was paid well and earned a handsome income but he succumbed to the hubris of external looks. He ended up buying more real estate, often at the top of the market and far in excess of his yearly income and in more than one place, all to give the impression to those who he wished to impress, that he was a man of means. What never seems to have dawned on him is that the friendships he was hoping to cultivate were largely from the upper class and he was nowhere near that in any way and they all knew it. He could have had 6 more big houses to his name and they would have still treated him as lower in station than they were.

What all that accumulation of debt did was put himself in increasingly vulnerable financial circumstances. Finally, with the end of the Napoleonic wars and England riding high, its surviving soldiers come home, what emerged across the nation was an almost immediate economic downturn, a very severe one bordering on depression. People stopped borrowing and building ever-large ostentatious structures. Our hero, William Smith, though his name was well known and his expertise was deeply respected, the economic implosion meant cancellation of many projects. He found his income in dire straights while all the while his debts accumulated. Finally they were untenable. Enough of his creditors used perfectly legal means to haul him before the debtor’s court. In those days, a bankrupt was put in jail, his property seized and where possible the proceeds were divided up amongst his creditors. What I found odd about the story of him going to jail was the description of the buildings where the bankrupt were incarcerated. These buildings were privately run and were mostly quite comfortable. In contrast to public jails, which often drove people to suicide because, the conditions were utterly horrific; debtor’s jail was quite fine.
He spent 11 weeks in prison and was finally released. He gathered up his mad wife and his nephew and exited London, enraged and bitter. Over the remaining years those who had conspired to steal his ideas and his maps and who blocked any proper appreciation of his work were slowly but surely dislodged by a fresh batch of fair-minded members of the geological society. In due course they made amends. They arranged for the state to give him a yearly pension so as to prevent any further financial embarrassments as he went into old age. They struck their first medal, in gold, and awarded it to the aged Smith, with great fanfare. He ended his days a very satisfied and well-respected discoverer. While it is true that by the time he had retired that other men of rocky zeal had discovered and described new elements, the foundations of geology and more important, the geological riches that lay beneath Britain’s surface had been catalogued, itemized and described with incredible accuracy. All the work of one man.

The author does a creditable job of creating an entertaining read, given the dearth of historical records and William Smith's largely unexceptional life. Alas (at least for narrative purposes), Smith wasn't one of those fascinating dilitantes of the 18th/19th century who managed to dabble in science, arts, literature, politics, and philosophy, all while managing an extravagent estate. Smith was obsessed with just one thing - geology/paleontology - but what he did, he did exceptionally well. His geologic map of the U.K. - the first geological map ever endeavored, remarkable accurate for its time - may not have changed the world on its own, but his theories on stratographic deposition - especially when combined with Darwin's insights into natural selection - definitely contributed to a continental shift (pun intended) in how future generations came to regard natural science.

Up until Smith's work at the beginning of the 19th century, it appears no one had bothered to question why the Earth beneath our feet seemed to be layed down in layers, why some of those layers contained coal while others didn't, nor why some of those layers seemed to contain fossils of sea life even though they were located far inland. Primarily this is because, at that time, people were busier trying (with uneven success) to fit observed facts into the Biblical account of Earth's genesis rather than visa versa.

Smith's work as a coal miner and drainage engineer placed him in the ideal position - geographically and historically - to start piecing together the puzzle that laid the foundation for a more scientific approach to geological time and Earth's origins.

All was not science and glory for Mr. Smith, however - partly due to the jealousy of rivals, partly due to bad luck, partly due - even the author admits - to Smith's own deficits. The man was an poor communicator, vain, spendthrift, and a terrible procrastinator, who also appears to have married unwisely and to have made a series of inexplicably reckless decisions that eventually led to disgrace and bankrupcy. Never fear - the story has a happy ending! Towards the end of his life Smith's reputation was salvaged and today the "Father of English Geology" occupies his rightful place in the pantheon of geology gods.

I agree that the story is a thin one, made even thinner by the fact that Smith appears to have been an inconsistent, unreliable journalist and there's a dearth of 3rd person accounts to corroborate or enrich Smith's sparse narrative. For instance, I'm still not sure whether his fascination with geology was merely the result of intellectual curiosity or more of an obsession/compulsion; I'm not clear whether he was socially adept or a social disaster(different anecdotes seem to come down on different sides); it's not clear to what extent Smith reconciled (or failed to reconcile) his findings with extant beliefs re. Earth's history; and Winchester's such a Smith fanboy that I can't shake the feeling he may have omitted information/analysis that would have shed a less favorable light on our reticent protagonist.

Having said that, I give Winchester props for making this story of geological exploration broad, engaging and accessible. If the author's portrait of Smith isn't quite complete, at least I gained interesting insights into British history, the geology of the U.K., the state of scientific discovery in the late 1700s/early 1800s, and debtor's prisons. His descriptions of geological phenomenon are simple and lucid (though a few more charts/graphs might have been useful). And if Winchester's heavy use of foreshadowing does sometimes confuse the chronology, at least it keeps you turning pages right up until the end. Perhaps not a great book, but I definitely don't regret the time I spent in Mr. Smith's company, and hope one day to be able to visit his great map at the headquarters of the Geological Society in London on the strength of this amiable tale.

Map that Changed the World by Simon Winchester was a thoroughly English book. This is not a criticism per se, just an observation from someone who has never been to England and so had to spend some time with a map (not the one in the book) to figure out where things were going on. Location travails aside, this biography of the man who invented the science of stratigraphy was engaging, enjoyable, and well written.
I, honestly, had not heard of William Smith prior to this book despite teaching the basics of stratigraphy which he discovered. The author, aside from a few short chapters, follows Smith's life chronologically and gives much credit for the results of his life to the position of his birth and keen observation skills. The author leads you to revel in Smith's successes and commesurate with him during his more troubled years. It is, in addition, a travelogue for those who might wish to take a tour of some of the more important and interesting geologic sites in England (now if I can just convince my wife and come up with the money).
If you are interested the history of science in general and in a tragically lesser known figure in the history of geology, you will enjoy this book... just make sure to have a map of England close to hand.

Lest anyone think that today's scientific fights are nasty, just take a look at what William Smith faced. He was thrown into debtors' prison because his findings were stolen by jealous competitors who were born higher on England's social scale, thus undermining the sale of his geologic map. This fascinating book blends Smith's remarkable personal story with the immensely important findings he made about geology, fossils, and their interplay. Smith's observations buttressed other people's emerging ideas about how the earth was formed, when it was formed, and how it was continuing to change --- and their accumulated understanding in the decades following Smith's death literally changed the world.

The scientific summary is that William Smith, born late in the 18th century, had two "genius" notions. First, he stated that different layers and types of rock represented their creation during different periods of time, with older ones being below newer ones unless tectonic upheavals folded and shifted them. He countermanded the assumption of even learned people of his day that the layers of the earth were laid down by God and had never changed since creation. Smith solidified his first observation with a second idea that proved to be even more influential on future scientists in many fields: that the fossils embedded in different layers of rock would tell irrefutably which layer was older that the other because "simpler" fossils were always found earlier than more "complex" fossils. This, of course, is the notion that led to the theory of evolution, which explained why organisms move from simple to complex over millions of years.

However, Smith was lowly born, and he needed patronage from nobility to be taken seriously in the emerging field of geology. Many nobles did support him, and they hired him as one of the nation's best surveyors of coal mines, drainer of marshes, and canal and road consultant. Others were jealous, and they stole his work (admittedly at a time when the rules for scientific or artistic plagiarism were a lot looser than they are today). So Smith spent many of his middle years fighting against the establishment that he was also dependent on for his income and that held the key to recognition of his achievements. Utimately, he was vindicated and presented with the highest honors that could be bestowed on a geologist. He even lived to see the field that he inspired move far beyond his work defining the layers of the earth.

The strength of this book lies in blending both Smith's story and detailed explanations of his scientific achievements with descriptions the culture in which he worked. What stands out for me is that Smith was an indefatiguable worker and traveler who learned geology by actually digging rocks and fossils everywhere he went. Whether it was a cliff, a coal mine, or the walls of a newly dug canal, Smith quarried stone and studied it. He drew fossils, and he categorized everything. His mind must have been extraordinary to keep all the details intact, and his energy must have been astonishing. The point is that this was in contrast to gentleman scientists of the day who spent their time arguing theories and polishing fossils that others had dredged up for them, rather than going out and figuring it out for themselves. Smith was one of the people who showed that the observational method was necessary --- a similar breakthrough that has been repeated in every type of scientific endeavor, from astronomy to chemistry to biology.

What makes this book outstanding is that it goes beyond even those matters. The author throws in his own observations that reflect his sense of wonder about the natural world. I loved the sections about the author's youthful days finding fossils and being hiked across cliffs to the sea by nuns, and his paeans to the beauty of the English countryside. These sections would't belong in a book that was only about the history of science, but they are great in a book that's part biography, part science history, and part meditation on the beauty of the earth.

In his own inimitable way, Simon Winchester tackles the history of geology as we know it now, courtesy of an Englishman named William Smith in The Map That Changed the World. Like Kepler and Copernicus before him, William Smith came to see truths about how Nature works that no one outside the workaday world of deep shaft mining had ever seen; he pursued the truths doggedly over the course of his life, and as the brilliant are often wont to do, neglected his health, his financial life, his family life in pursuit of the truth about how the world under our feet is made. Simon Winchester patiently tells us Smith's story, through feast, famine, even debtor's prison at one point, as Smith kept at his search for the story of how the Earth is made through acclaim and betrayal, eventually to be recognized as the father of modern geology.

Very few people are as good at relating the human side of the dogged researcher as Simon Winchester is. He is so good at telling us the stories of these lives spent in pursuit of knowledge, avoiding hyperbole and sanctimony to get at the essence of why people devote their lives to learning about the little-known and barely suspected. It's a skill one wouldn't ordinarily look to a recognized journalist for; but Simon Winchester demonstrated it earlier to me in his The Fracture Zone, a travelogue to the Balkans in two eras - their prosperous and peaceful salad days of the 1970s, then the more recent and horrific time during and after the wars which broke out from Croatia, across Serbia and Montenegro, to the former republic of Macedonia (whose proper name is a heated controversy of its own, for reasons neither immediately nor after reflection obvious).

The Map That Changed the World is not just for learning how we came to have the science of geology. It's an engrossing human story, in which one man's persistence and dogged determination is just as remarkable as the story he found in the layers of stone and coal under parts of Britain which became the very first stratigraphic map. Books like this impart not just knowledge - but a sense of how our odd race of creatures came to rule this planet - through insatiable curiosity.

Winchester provides a worthwhile overview of a man that played an important role in the history of geology. For those interested in knowing more about the details of Smith's life and accomplishments this is a good source. However. the book suffers from a small flaw and a large one. The small flaw is Winchester is short of material for the size of the book, even though it is only 301 pages long. Sometimes it feels like a day-by-day summary of Smith's life with repeated descriptions of his repeateed travels across England as well as references to his eventual financial problems. One could skim several of the chapters in the middle without missing anything of importance. The last chapters are better, if a little melodramatic.

The big flaw is Winchester presents a greatly oversize estimation of Smith's importance to the field of geology. As a professional geologist I had heard of Smith, but not his supposedly world changing map. I actually checked four textbooks on historical geology. None give him more than a few sentences and none mention his map. Generally he is described as an engineer that notiiced that fossils could be used to correlate rock layers, which he found usefful in his work. Winchester admits Smith is a hero of his and variously describes him as the "Father of Modern Geology" and the father of "Father of British Geology". I'll grant the latter, but the former is generally applied to James Hutton, who gets a relavively brief description in the book. Winchester also mentions Nicholaus Steno, but fails to mention that he developed the foundational principals of stratigraphy and is considered the father of stratigraphy. From his book one might infer that title should go to William "Strata" Smith. He does not mention at all that at the same time as Smith a Frenchman, Georges Cuvier, was making the same observations about how fossils could be used to correlate rock layers and that they occurred in certain sequences. Cuvier went further than Smith and attempted to explain what he saw. Since Winchester never attempts to claim anything more in spite of his high opinion of Smith's accomplishments, it's a safe conclusion that Smith's work never rose above the observational. In summary, the book is a good source of specific information on Smith, but not so good of one on the general history of geology.

Simon Winchester has given me hours of enjoyment with his books, wrapping his subjects in a warm blanket of articulate enthusiasm. His writing pleases me. I picked up The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (P.S.) with high expectations; geology, Winchester's own field of study at Oxford--surely he would serve up a feast? I didn't find it so when measured against his other work.

This is the story of William "Strata" Smith, born in Oxfordshire in 1769, at the start of the Industrial Revolution. Though his humble background did not permit a formal education, he was lucky enough to find employment and training with a surveyor. Early in England's canal-building era, Smith's work often took him underground where he was fascinated by the layers and fossils revealed to his eye in mines and excavations.

England has a fascinating geological history. It has been desert, mountain range, covered repeatedly by warm water and in recent history by glaciers; like the rest of the world's land masses, it has pinballed around the planet as super-continents formed, collided, and richoceted apart. Winchester hits his stride in the telling of this history.

Smith studied the layers and folds of the earth and the fossils found in each layer, until he felt confident that he could describe the underground elements of the entire country. His famous colored map--the one that changed the world--was published in 1815. Geology was just coming into its own as a science and the leaders in the field, men of education and comfortable circumstances, snubbed the working-class Smith and freely plagiarized his work. Not until late in his life was he accorded the recognition that he had earned, along with a pension to ease his last years.

Smith's personal life was apparently fraught with bad financial decisions and he spent many years barely evading the bailiffs and tip-staffs; in fact he had one stint in debtor's prison and was forced to sell his stellar fossil collection to the British Museum for a pittance, to pay some debts. His wife was of unsound mental health, her condition allegedly manifested by nymphomania. Smith's diaries and journals were expurgated either before or after his death but there should have been enough remaining to bring the man more fully to life; somehow we don't see him as clearly as we would like. This is one of the relative weaknesses of the book.

Overall, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (P.S.) is a little too loosely strung together to give the same enjoyment as the The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, or the The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary (P.S.). Even Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire has a more cohesive feel, though it's essentially a series of travel stories strung together by the common theme referred to in its title. The geology of England is a big story, but it may be that the life of William Smith could not carry the weight of Winchester's rousing style. If you love Winchester, or geology, there is plenty here for you, but it's not the first of his books I would recommend.

Linda Bulger, 2009

The map that changes the world is not about navigation!. It told of the fascinating story about a canal digger, William Smith in 18th century England made careful observation on the different layers of earth when he went to to coal mines. Out of curiosity, he toured around and made survey around England and eventually drew a beautiful map with color. The segment layers of earth helped understand the geologic changes of the earth, from sea to land, an enlightenment from the tradition of Bible creation way of thinking. This helped later for Darwin on evolution.

Simon wrote beautifully on Smith's life - an ordinary man achieving the extraordinary, the pioneer for geology. However, Smith was a researcher without the idea of getting rich or gaining prestige. His intellectual property was easily taken over by the educated and famous in the society. Smith went through debtor's prison and became homeless. The pioneer was lonely and poor.

Simon is credit to share the story of William Smith in his discovery in the map that changed the world in geology, earth history and science.

As an amateur student of history of sciences / techs, I was especially pleased when this book arrived.

Smith provided important geologic / uniformitarian support to Darwin's theory of human descent (through natural selection over millions of years). Smith pioneered the 'concept of faunal / fossil succession' as an art of fossil interpretation. He was practically self taught as an amateur practical scientist. While earning a living as a surveyor / construction engineer during the age of coal & canal-building, Smith would puzzle over the strata revealed during mining and construction excavation. Smith's influence, through Lyell's GEOLOGY, 'traveled' with Darwin on the Voyage of the Beagle and helped Darwin to interpret fossils in terms of his developing idea of 'natural selection'.

Also, I personally feel that to understand the success of Darwin's Revolution after 1859, Smith & Mendel are essential in demonstrating the enormous range of application of the new theory -- each added evidence which extended the explanatory strengths of the hypothesis of 'natural selection', in fossils (Smith) & in genetics (Mendel) respectively.

Note: wikipedia --'The influence of faunal succession would also eventually affect biology. Although Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace would not propose the theory of natural selection until after Smith's death, Smith's work enabled geologists and biologists of subsequent generations to think in terms of long expanses of time--a necessary ingredient for Darwinian evolution to occur.'

The history of William Smith (1769-1839) who is considered the father of modern geology. While working as a surveyor in English coal mines, Smith noticed the consistency of the layers of rock and how they always appeared in the same order no matter the location. He also realized that the layers, or strata, could be identified and aged by the fossils they contained. This knowledge had useful implications in locating coal and other valuable mineral deposits. Smith developed the first geological map of England in 1815 but his work was plagiarized by others, and he was eventually sent to debtor's prison.

Simon Winchester does a good job enlivening what might otherwise be a very hard and dry subject. The implications of the map were enormous; this was a time when much of England took the Biblical account of the creation very literally, and an Irish priest had even determined the supposed exact date of the creation. However, Winchester doesn't spend a lot of time using it as an excuse to bash religion but focuses on the known events of Smith's life (which is often sparse) and spins it into an interesting tale. He frequently muses on the particulars, allowing himself to wonder and invent possible circumstances, but on the whole he sticks to the facts. He also tends to overplay the experience in debtor's prison as well as the significance of "firsts" ("first" time this or that was discussed or written down, etc...).

I initially listened to the audio book (which I think was read by the author himself) but it was so dull I promptly quit. But the book was much better and at 300 pages (footnotes and drawings abound throughout the book) was a rather pleasant and easy read (a lukewarm 4 stars).

"The Map That Changed The World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology", by Simon Winchester, Perennial, New York 2002, ISBN: 0-06-019361-1, PB 329/302 Prologue 5 pgs., Epilogue 12 pgs., Glossary 8 pgs., Ref./Sources 6 pgs., Index 10 pgs. Inveiglements several charts, tables, fig. fossils. 8 ½" x 5 1/4".

This book is a delightful and absorbing read: authored by a NY Times bestseller, Simon Winchester, an Oxford student of geology writes not just well, but authoritatively.

We are presented with the life and times of William Smith, an esteemed original thinker and canal digger by trade who came to recognize, as early as 1793, the presence of diverse fossils within various strata of rock layers provided important clues that allowed him to conceptualize and construct (by mapping) a time line for the formation of the earth's crust: that uniqueness of fossils could precisely predict a strata's composition. In consideration, thereof, he amassed his own fossil collection, each specimen (several thousand) assiduously arranged in correct time order of appearance in the earth's crust.

Dr. Smith is considered to be the Father of English Geology by virtue of his published writings and colored maps showing geologic composition of lands across much of England. The author chronicles Smith's lively and unusual past, at times destitute, - of those disadvantaged years of investigative work including times spent in the debtors prison, and also of the eventual deserved recognitions that included the Wollaston Medal, Honorary Doctorate Degree, and ennoblement (pension). In many ways his place, time, field, and contributions to science paralleled closely those of Charles Darwin, but Wm. Smith lacked a gentile or noble background and family name. He is to be cherished.

finis

William Smith gained an insight into our planet's structure unseen by nearly all his contemporaries. Recognizing that bands of rock repeated their patterns across central England, he found he could forecast the location of likely mineral deposits. Winchester traces the course of Smith's career with easy style and immense feeling. This is no scholarly, pedantic exercise [although Winchester clearly has done his research], the author's too sympathetic with his subject for that. His empathy with Smith permeates nearly every page. The feelings are enhanced by the ammonite illustrations heading each chapter. One almost
regrets the publisher not giving them more space.
Graphics space aside, Winchester's descriptive abilities imparts this tale of a man's troubled life at the beginning of the 19th Century with sincerity. Keeping the great map that resulted from Smith's work before us throughout the book, Winchester brings all the threads together with graceful ease. Smith wandered the British countryside, collecting fossils, data, building a picture of what lay under the surface soil. He linked outcrops, canal cuts through hills, assembled samples and studied patterns. The result, as Winchester urges, "changed the world." The map led to a more vivid image of the Earth's formation and geologic activity, setting the stage for Lyell and Darwin. That rocks displayed patterns was the basis for the concept of change over time - the earth wasn't static. There was a discernible continuity over the millennia. Smith, of course, had no concept of the span of time involved, as Winchester reminds us, but without the schema Smith developed, we might yet still see the Earth as static.
Winchester avoids background description of Smith's era. This keeps this book within a reasonable size, but leaves Smith's working world a bit vague. It was, after all, the era of the Napoleonic wars. England was in social and political ferment. Natural science was burgeoning for numerous reasons, not the least of which was a strong rise in commercial and industrial endeavor. Smith's wife is characterized as a nymphomaniac, but the evidence for this is scanty. If her condition was publicly known it would have had strong impact on Smith's professional life. Was Smith's heavy debt load due as much to her as to his
inadvisable property investments? Winchester was unable to unearth the fiscal details of Smith's life. It's enough that between fiscal and marital problems, Winchester shows how the morals of the era allowed Smith's work to be plagiarized without recourse. The combination of events finally led him into exile in Northern England. Although belated, Smith's story has a reasonably happy conclusion. Winchester traces the redemption of Smith's reputation and the honours bestowed near the end of his life.
The book is a stimulating read. Winchester isn't an arm-chair writer. He takes us along on his own journey across Britain, tracing Smith's path over the landscape. The book is, in effect, a second redemption of Smith, bringing him into the view of the modern world. Winchester shows us clearly how much work is involved in doing good science, especially with limited resources, erratic backing and an uncomprehending public. This book deserves the widest possible readership.

In _The Map that Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of
Modern Geology_ (HarperCollins), Simon Winchester has done a splendid
job of investigating how people thought of rock layers and fossils
before Smith came along, how Smith cogitated better ideas, how he
promulgated them, how he was betrayed, and how he was eventually
redeemed. This is a great story of a one-man scientific
revolution. Key to the story is that Smith was a nobody. He was the
son of the village blacksmith and had limited schooling. He liked
looking at rocks, especially fossils. When he eventually became a
surveyor, he had the perfect job. He got it at a perfect time, when he
was able to descend into the coal mines and try to make sense of the
strata, and when surveying was needed for the canals to carry the
coal, canals that enabled him to see what the country all around
looked like when sliced into.

It was in 1815 that Smith's map emerged,
"A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales With Part of
Scotland." If mounted in one sheet, it was about nine by six
feet. It was an entirely different representation of Britain than
anyone had ever seen before, and the map's novelty and the
intellectual acumen which had gone into it were not lost among those
who knew something of fossils and digging. Unfortunately, among those
who appreciated the map were members of a learned organization called
the Geological Society, formed in London in 1807. Smith had made
important contributions to the fledgling science, but was pointedly
not invited to join; the founders were more interested in having
gentlemen like themselves at their meetings, and Smith would not
do. Furthermore, these gentlemen treated Smith even worse: they
admired his map, and coveted it, and stole its ideas to make their own
competitive copy, and undercut him. Smith landed in debtors' prison,
and after that lived a hand-to-mouth existence. Happily, he did get
recognition before he died, a heartwarming ending to a great
story.

Simon Winchester loves telling it. He can be forgiven for
sometimes overstating the importance of William Smith. It is, however,
certainly true that Smith's map was part of a new way of looking at
the world. It took its place in the nineteenth century's scientific
view of the world's history which freed people from relying on the
Bible as a scientific guide. Winchester is right repeatedly to tell of
different facets of the map's importance. He has a love of the
dramatic, and his words show it: "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 at last broken free from the age-old
constraints of doctrine and canonical instruction."

First, the story of William Smith "The Father of British Geology" is in itself a wonderful story of a truly forgotten man. Though he died with many honors to his credit, Smith earned most of them in his last ten years. Leading up to this time he had been rejected by 'his betters' because he lacked education, training and class standing. Once he had begun to publish, many tried to steal his works and his 'thunder' by claiming that they were the 'discoverers'.

Second, having been praised at the end of his life, he was then promptly forgotten after his death. Why? Well mostly because the majority of his work, which at the time was revolutionary, had now become common place and mundane. It's amazingly difficult to be the inventor, but the 'johnnie-come-latelies' never seem to want to acknowledge the lone inventor in his/her atelier slaving away for years. (Quick, name the man who invented the cathode ray tube or name the man who invented the first copier.)

As a bonus to this great story, Winchester's reading of the story adds so many more insights than that of a standard reader. He seldomly uses voices but his inflection is what makes the story so interesting. Being so close to the topic he knows where to sound excited and where to be pedestrian. Good job all around.

Zeb Kantrowitz
zbestblogaround.blogspot.com

Simon Winchester's "The Map That Changed the World" is 20% too long, with some convoluted and repetitive narrative stretches (and personal reminiscences tossed in for good measure.) At its best - and there is so much that is so good - , this nonfiction rendering reads like a good mystery with all the relevant components: rivalries, jealousies, fortunes, and the quintessentially British classism complicating all things. However, the overarching mystery - just what lies beneath the visible expanses of earth - is what William Smith unearthed (literally,) obsessed over, analyzed, and finally solved during his unheralded half-century at the task of establishing the validity and veracity of geology. Happily, he finally did gain the esteem and respect that his humble birth had for decades denied him.
My other complaint (beyond the too long by 1/5 noted above) is that too little is included to pinpoint precisely where Mr. Smith dug up precisely what, thus enabling him to devise his pre-Darwinian theories of the earth's age and composition. More illustrations of fossils and, definitely, more maps are needed here. Fortunately, I was able to find a downloadable rendition of Mr. Smith's elegantly detailed and hand-painted document online. Each of its fifteen 8 ½ x 11 pages could have filled a page of the text quite nicely, with a Playboy-esque centerfold of the entire project pulling it all together. It is a remarkable document.
And again, as in "The Professor and the Madman," Winchester has captured the peculiar English trait which has bestowed so much knowledge to the world: the obsessed eccentric driven to eventual greatness and landmark discoveries.

William Smith belongs to a lost world where practical men could observe, explore, tinker, theorize, test and create breakthrough knowledge of a practical and theoretical nature.

This is the story of Smith's personal and professional life as a civil engineer, explorer, mapmaker,scientist for hire, canal builder, author, collector and GEOLOGIST.

Smith noticed similarities from place to place in England. He explored and took notes. He leveraged his day job to travel, dig and test. He connected the dots between common minerals and soils, fossils and terrain to posit a theory of layers of earth that suggested creation through time by common processes. He created maps that made his theories plausible to everyone who was interested.

The author tells a compelling story about triumph and tragedy of a human scientist who was addicted to his work, but who paused and focused long enough to share his discoveries. Anyone with an interest in science and people will find this work accessible and enjoyable.

Simon Winchester, the author of the deservedly best-selling The Professor and the Madman, writes in The Map that Changed the World about William Smith, who was dubbed in 1831--a bit belatedly--The Father of English Geology by the then president of the Geological Society of London. Smith's great work was an enormous--some 8 x 6 feet--geological map of England, the data for which Smith had spent a considerable part of his lifetime collecting single-handedly. The map, which delineates in splendid color the various strata of rock that underlie England, was the first of its kind. Smith himself was a maverick intellect for his understanding of both the implications of the strata for the history of the Earth and the importance to the rocks' identification of the fossils that could be collected from them.

Smith also had an interesting personal history in that his great efforts for science were so unremunerative that he landed for some eleven weeks at the age of fifty in one of London's great debtors' prisons. Winchester makes much of this great irony in his book, that a monumental figure should be so ill-treated and so long unrespected during his lifetime.

For all Smith's merits as a subject, however, Winchester's narrative is a bit of a slog. His emphasis is very often on the science of geology rather than the personality of Smith. This is reasonable enough given the subject matter of the book, but I, at least, frequently found the author's discussion difficult to follow. Winchester may, as a one-time student of geology at Oxford, have had too high an opinion of his layman readers' capacities. (Or I, of course, may not have been the proper audience for the book.) For those who are not geologically inclined, there may be more discussion of strata, however, than is palatable: "Below the 300 feet of chalk, Smith declaimed before the others, were first 70 feet of sand. Then 30 feet of clay. Then 30 more feet of clay and stone. And 15 feet of clay. Then 10 feet of the first of named rocks, forest marble. And 60 feet of freestone." And so on.

Winchester's narrative does become more interesting toward the book's end, when Smith has, finally, published his map and he is imprisoned for debt--the great dramatic moment toward which the book has been leading. But Smith's stay in the King's Bench Prison is itself anticlimactic, because while Winchester alludes to its "horrors" earlier on, he finally describes debtors' prison as a sort of country club, where the indebted middle-class pass their time playing cards or bowling and drinking beer. Trying and embittering it may have been to be locked away while his possessions were riffled through and sold off, but it was evidently not horrific.

Winchester's writing is at its most charming--and he does write charmingly--in the most personal section of the book, when he tells the story of his discovery at the age of six of an ammonite fossil. He and his fellow convent boys were led by the sisters of the Blessed Order of the Visitation on a miles-long walk to the sea, an expedition they undertook once a week. Winchester's account of the boys' riotous plunge into the sea shows just how nicely he can turn a phrase:

"Up here there always seemed to be a cool onshore breeze blowing up and over the summit. It was tangy with salt and seaweed, and the way it cooled the perspiration was so blessed a feeling that we would race downhill into it with wing-wide arms, and it would muss our hair and tear at our uniform caps, and we would fly down toward the beach and to the surging Channel waves that chewed back and forth across the pebbles and the sand.

"I seem to remember that by this point in the weekly expedition the dozen or so of us--all called by numbers, since the convent's peculiar regime forbade the use of names; I was simply 46--were well beyond caring what the nuns might think: The ocean was by now far too magnetic a temptation. Once in a while we might glance back at them as they stood, black and hooded like carrion crows, fingering their rosaries and muttering prayers or imprecations--but if they disapproved of us tearing off our gray uniforms and plunging headlong into the surf, so what? This was summer, here was the sea, and we were schoolboys--a combination of forces that even these storm troopers of the Blessed Visitation could not overwhelm."

Perhaps Winchester will one day expand on this passage with further autobiographical fare.

Reviewed by Debra Hamel, author of Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan's Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

This was a disappointing book and for the first half was more like a geology and paleontology textbook than a biography. It was difficult reading and required determination to fight through the technical jargon. It was only at about the mid-point of the book that the politics, intrigue, romance and other essential elements of a good story came into play.
The writing style does not lend itself to easy reading either. Many sentences are far too long - and even have long sub-sentences in the middle, split by the unusual punctuation of dashes - before the original sentence is again picked up and concluded. Coincidentally, or maybe not, this writing style appears more frequently in the rather dry first half of the story than in the latter half where the action begins to pick up.
There was also a great deal of repetition, almost as if the author, Simon Winchester, was trying to pad out the book. Perhaps the truth is that the whole story could, and perhaps should, have been told in just a few chapters rather than the whole 300 pages. In fact the five page prologue to the book presents a concise precis of its entire contents.
Winchester did succeed though in gaining the reader's sympathy for the man, William Smith, who produced the map that changed the world. Set in England 200 years ago, the story of Smith's brilliance in geological pioneering investigation, hands-on field work, identification of fossils and understanding of the importance of their place in the various geological stratas, is fascinating. As a man of humble origins, his battle against the dilettante, upper class, amateur academics who ignored or vilified him was as big a challenge as his real work. The map signed by W. Smith and dated August 1st 1815 was finally accepted as the first true and accurate record of "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland". He was to be the inaugural winner of the Wollaston Medal, the geological equivalent of a Nobel prize, in 1831, in the autumn of his life.
The book is well worth the read but be prepared to work hard to get the most out of it.

Central to the nature of science is the organization of relaible information into verifiable forms which lend themselves to further analysis.
The birth of the industrial society in the mid to late eighteenth cetury gave rise to a huge demand for coal to power the factories which churned out goods for domestic consumption and for export. The coal industry required access into the deep recesses of the English earth. as well as technical advise from, among other professionals, land surveyors.
William Smith, a rather common individual, poorly educated, but possessed of good surveying skills found himself in great demand by the coal producers. After countless trips down mine shafts Smith made a critical observation-the strata for the earth passed through on the passage down the shaft of any one mine was repeated in every mine as well regardless of location.
The practical implication was enormous, for by the examining the exposed and weathered surface of any English landform, one was able to predict with certainty the type of strata which lay immediately below. Further knowing what in that layer, enabled the prediction of the layer which lay directly below that, and so forth. Thus it could be reliably predicted the location of minable minerals below the earth on the basis of surface observations.
Had Smith stopped there he would have still had an important place in the history of the science of geology. However, he studied and classified each of the strata by characteristics, and gave names to them, thus creating a common scientific vocabulary for other scientists to use in confirming his observations.
Smith went even further creating a beautiful map of the geological structure of England and Wales, which elegantly encapsulated his work into a practical and useful tool. This is a superb book on the life and times of a most unlikely giant of science William Smith.

I liked this book slightly more than The Meaning of Everything, but not that much more. Which leads me to believe that it's the writing that I'm struggling with as opposed to the subject matter. Granted, most people would argue that geology is not an especially interesting topic (I'm not one of those people, BTW) but this is really about the public feelings about this new science that might disprove all their widely and closely held beliefs.

Simon Winchester has produced a worthy successor to The Professor and the Madman, his study of one of the unlikeliest contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary. The Map That Changed the World is the story of William Smith, a self taught and brilliant geologist who created the first geological map of England and Wales.
This book is a delight for several reasons. First, it successfully evokes the atmosphere of the late eighteenth century to early nineteenth century, an exciting period when scientific inquiry was beginning to challenge old certainties. William Smith did not just develop a new way to depict the earth's surface, he was developing a new theory about the earth's history and thereby challenging religious orthodoxy. Secondly, this book works because William Smith himself was such a pleasant, unpretentious fellow. His singleminded devotion to geology brought him into contact with many British aristocrats, whom he seems to have treated in the same down to earth style he used for everyone. This, along with some disastrous financial and marital decisions,led to Smith's impoverishment and imprisonment for debt and (probably worst of all to him) his blacklisting from membership in the elite Geographical Society. It is good to know at the end of the book that Smith overcame these setbacks and by the end of his life was receiving the honor and acclaim he deserved. The third reason to buy this book is Simon Winchester's writing itself. As in everything he produces, Winchester sparkles and charms. So buy the book, along with anything else by Winchester you can find.

Inside the front cover of my edition is a reproduction of `the map' as produced by William Smith, whereas the back cover has the Royal Geological Survey map produced in 2001. The striking similarity between the two is a testimony to the work of Smith.

Smith did not set out to produce a geological map of the British Isles, but to earn a living in the canal boom years before the advent of the railway era in Britain. The Somerset Coal Canal is another one of his legacies, and he also worked extensively throughput the Somerset coal field, to the South and West of Bath. His true insight may well have been at Mearns Pit, in High Littleton in this coal field. Like many noteworthy discoveries, Smith took many years to work out his ideas, to publish them (and even more to get credit for them).

Geology was at the forefront of science in late 18th century. There were lots of gentleman-scientists, who had rock collections. Slowly, Smith sought to bring order to the series of rocks that were visible in Britain, and he did this by comparing fossils from different locations. His insight was to realise that the order of rocks (in terms of strata) was passed on; if A is above rock B, and B is above rock C, then A must be above rock C. Seen from the 21st Century, that seemed obvious, but at the time it was a real struggle to breakout of the dogmas of the era. At the beginning of Smith's life, Bibles were still printed which declared the date of the earth's creation.

Simon Winchester has written a thoroughly absorbing account of Smith's life and work, and inhabited the pages with snippets of information about the life and times. It is well researched, and uses letters and diary entries of Smith and his contemporaries that survive. Smith cuts a figure of tragedy at times, with disappointment seeming to follow him around. His ideas were all but stolen, he spent some weeks in jail for debt in the summer of 1819, and he missed out on several chances to work abroad, staying for hollow promises of work in London.

I enjoyed the line-drawings of fossils that headed each chapter, and the glossary of geological terms was a useful addition. I also never realised that the house that has an inscribed tablet championing Smith (a little over 4 miles from where I live, myself at the Northern limit of the Somerset coal field) is the wrong house! A very good read, and one of the growing series of history of science books published in the last few years. What Smith's contemporaries failed to do in the early years of the nineteenth century, Simon Winchester has done; hailed a truly remarkable man who travelled the length and breadth of Britain to produce a lasting product; a map. Fortunately Smith was recognised in his lifetime (eventually) and honoured accordingly. Now we can do the same.

Peter Morgan, Bath, UK ([email protected])

I thoroughly enjoyed Winchester's other book, "The Professor and the Mad Man" so I was eager to read this. Very disappointed. The book was dull and moved about as fast as a geological epoch. It never caught my attention. I believe for a serious student of geology or British geology it might be interesting.

I do not recommend this book.

William Smith certainly led a fascinating life. Born of humble origins, he managed, despite enormous pluck and know-how, to return to them in his dotage. The great arc of this life is very interesting and Simon Winchester does a marvelous job in putting together the pieces of this story in a way that not only portrays the development of Smith's famous map, but also the historical context in which it was developed. I found much of this background material as rewarding as the narrative itself.
However, if both components are strong, sometimes it seems as though Winchester was worried about their cumulative effect. He tends to overhype the map - noting not only in the title that it changed the world, but throughout the book itself. Unfortunately, if it was a new way of looking at the world, Winchester spends little time showing how the map could exert its influence. How does a two dimensional map portray the three dimensional strata of the earth? The problems are not merely technical, for while Smith came to be recognized for his contributions, it is not clear how others built on them and how they have had a lasting influence.
These concerns, coupled with a tendency to overpersonalize his attachment to Smith's story, were my only reservations. Winchester is an otherwise clear and enthusiastic writer and the book moves quickly through the details of Smith's life with compassion and understanding. This is certainly a book I would recommend.
Online buyers should also note that the book jacket itself unfolds to become a bright coloured replica of Smith's original map. This is a very nice touch.

After reading Winchester's book "The Professor and the Madman" I was very interested in reading some more of Simon Winchester's work. The Map That Changed the World was the book that he wrote after The Professor. It took me some time to get around to read it, but I was looking forward to it. Winchester does a prodigious amount of research for his books and it shows as we learn about the stated subject of the book as well as all the details that surround it.
The Map That Changed the world deals with William Smith, an amateur geologist living at the end of the 18th Century. William Smith had a driving ambition and interest in finding out exactly what was under the ground in England. This may not seem like much, but the methods and knowledge that Smith acquired during his research and over decades of work were the building blocks for modern geology and for discovering everything we know about the geology of our planet. William Smith is rightfully called the father of geology.
This book is filled with details of geology: rocks, strata, the ages of the earth, the Geological Society of London, etc. On one hand, this is a very interesting work. It tells the story of how one man pretty much established the ground rules for geology and what it can begin to know. On the other hand, this book is so heavily detailed that it is dry reading. I don't have a strong interest in geology, so I was interest in this book more for the historical implications rather than the geological ones (even though they overlap at times). I think this book is worth reading for anyone interested in the social/scientific history of the time, and without reservation for anyone interested in geology. This is a well written book.

I was enthusiastic about the book at first. The catchy title, the attractive front cover, and particularly the addition of drawings of ammonites at the beginning of each chapter appealed to me. It turned out to be a great disappointment. Half-way through the book, as I was reading about Smith's financial difficulties, I have to admit that I thought,"Who cares?". The reason is not that William Smith or his life or his research are uninteresting, quite the contrary; it is the author's style that is stuffy. He writes in a way that makes it sound as if the whole subject bored him out of his mind, that he couldn't wait to be done with it, and threw in a lot of fancy words to make up for his own lack of enthusiasm.
I love geology, and I wish that William Smith and the seminal research he did were shown in a better light. This book doesn't do justice to either of them.

more in common with another recent best-seller of the literary non-fiction genre - Dava Sobel's `Longitude'. Both books tell the story of an Englishman beset by hindrances and misunderstanding on their quest to unlocking the secrets of Natural Science. Winchester's book is about William Smith, a man who created the first geological map of England, and ostensibly the first geological map ever.
Smith's story is one of hardships - orphaned early, without a formal education, Smith managed to achieve his goal even though he married a `madwoman', was overlooked by the upper-classes and was forever worrying about money. These aspects of the story are quite interesting. But Winchester includes a lot of information about the geology of England, which in places gets a bit tedious for a reader that is not all that interested in rocks. Another annoying thing with this book is the use of asterisks - Winchester puts a lot of his information in footnotes at the bottom of the page, which is okay when used sparingly, but there are sections when 3 pages in every 4 use this!
That said, this book is worth plugging through to see what happens at the end. And perhaps some readers will find the sections on geology fascinating. But this book is not really as good as the two mentioned in the first paragraph. If you are a fan of Winchester, or of English history, you will enjoy this book. Otherwise I would suggest that you look elsewhere.

William Smith was the father of English geography. He was the first recipient of the Wollaston Medal. This medal has the significance of a Nobel Prize.

Smith was untutored, unlettered, and a genius. The map in question is a map of the substrata of England and Wales devised by one person in his walks, hikes, theorizing, and geological investigations, published circa 1815.

The occasion of Smith's discoveries was coal mining and the consequent canal building undertaken to transport the coal to markets. Smith, surveyor and drainer of flood lands, had the opportunity to see below the earth in the various mines created for coal extraction. He ascertained that stratification was orderly in accordance with fossil finds.

Although much-honored at the end of his life, Smith underwent many hardships in the course of his career including imprisonment for debt. Winchester does a wonderful job of making the subject matter exciting and the science understandable. He creates atmosphere in his book reminding one of Thomas Hardy and Jane Austen for reason of his description of places, buildings, building materials, and rocks.

As you can I was disappointed by this biography - but I have been in the past by Winchester's writing. His first biography "The professor and the Madman" put me off him. Why? because I always feel he overplays the salacious parts of the story at the expense of a what is actually a rootling good yarn. That is this is the story of a William Smith who, without real education orsocial position, managed to overturn a great number of accepted notions about the earth's formation and really open up the underworld to geologists. Instead Winchester begins with a dramatic introduction about how his maps are never seen now, hidden by curtains (to prevent light from fading the colours) and then dwelling lovingly on the time in which William Smith returned from debtors prison to find that he was without a house or belongings. Now, this seemed to me to be hardly the most dramatic moment in his long life of dramatic moments and discoveries - yet this and Smith's mad wife get quite a showing in this book even though both have been expunged from his diaries and not even mentioned in other parts of writings about him and his autobiography. That is - there is so little information it is all speculation - not history.
Anyway - I had just come to this book from reading Deborah Cadbury's book on the same period - but about the first discoveries of what fossils meant to the geological timetable of the world - and I have to say that the comparison is not flattering. While Cadbury deals with her subjects, teasing out the known facts about them and letting them almost speak for themselves, I always feel like Winchester is trying to dress up his subjects and speak for them - ordering their world to sound very dramatic.
I felt most disappointed in Winchester when he was discussing William Smith's saviour in the geological world, that is Fitton's contribution to his being finally recognised. I just didn't think the way it was told rang true. Winchester made this huge feature of the article Fitton wrote in the Edinburgh review which apparently triggered the change. Yet Winchester admitted in slightly more measured tones later that this didn't actually trigger a change for some years and made no difference at the time at all because a year later Smith was acutally in debtors prison.
The lack of real chronological telling of the story, the use of unnecessary side notes to the story and the overdramatisation of various features put me off this book and on a subject I am really interested in. I would recommend you try Deborah Cadbury for a much better representation of this period of geology.

This book deserves more than five stars!
I enjoy intellectual, scientific, and social history, and was delighted to see all three forms combined in one outstanding book. The result provides many interesting and helpful perspectives on the development of three-dimensional geological maps and their later use in the sciences of geology and biology, and in looking for mineral reserves.
The details of this book are lovingly developed. Let's begin with the illustrations. The jacket dust cover can be unfolded to display a large, colored replica of William Smith's first geological map of Great Britain. Each stratum is colored in so it is darkest near the bottom and lightest near the top. You also get two smaller versions on color plates within the book. In identifying similar strata, he relied on differences in ammonite fossils, and 18 line drawings open 18 chapters so you can see how these compare to one another. You also get line drawings of oolitic limestone in which fossils are often found, and the types of fossils used as weighing stones and marbles on the farm where Mr. Smith grew up.
To make the connection to Mr. Smith's thought process, the author has visited many of the sites where Mr. Smith made his initial observations that led him to develop the concept of the modern geological map. One particularly interesting one is a chapter about the author's own youth and finding a perfect fossil sample.
Mr. Smith was not part of the gentry, which regularly provided the scientific advances of those days. Mostly self-taught, he was first a surveyer and later learned enough engineering to work on canals and projects like draining swamps. The gentry alternately encouraged and spurned him, which made the task more difficult.
Mr. Smith's thought process basically involved noting that the order of strata in collieries were often the same. Mr. Smith began to theorize that the strata were connected over vast sections of land. Later work with canals proved him right, where he could expose considerable lengths of land to see the connections. Close observation led him to realize the potential use of fossils for strata identification at a time when The Origin of Species had not been written and Darwin was still a Creationist.
From there, he worked mostly alone over decades to fill in the geological map with his own observations. It was an enormous task that no one would today consider doing alone! The problems of getting the first maps published are well described, as well.
The book also puts the challenge that this work made to Creationism into a helpful perspective. The illustrations include a Bible page showing the date of the Creation as 4004 B.C.
The subtle social interactions are also interesting, as Mr. Smith was considered someone to meet with for some purposes and not for others. He was snubbed during the founding of the Geological Society and the same people later plagiarized his work! Mr. Smith overspent his financial resources in pursuing the project, and fell into a ruinous debt and a disastrous marriage. The combination led him into debtor's prison just before the first map was published. He came out of prison to find his home boarded up and his possessions gone. He proceeded to live in obscurity for the next 12 years until scholarly praises for his work once again drew attention to him. In his last few years, he received honors (such as the first Wollaston Medal and a pension from the king).
I also enjoyed reading about the books that Mr. Smith read to learn about how to create maps and overlay survey results. The process in use in those days often meant that he had to carry 40 maps with him while he traveled around the countryside to check outcroppings.
Anyone who has studied geology will want to read this book. People who are fascinated by what one dedicated person can do will find the story inspirational. Those who enjoy understanding how important ideas developed will enjoy how observation led to new conclusions by Mr. Smith. Those who are interested in how evolution became accepted will enjoy how the explantion for fossils changed from God's way of showing his omnipotence to their being seen as the crystalized remnants of ancient sea creatures.
After you finish enjoying this magnificent volume, I encourage you to look around and consider where the current explanations don't match what actually seems to be going on. For example, many people have forecast problems of various sorts that have never occurred, while many actual problems have arrived unannounced. Why are these misperceptions occuring?
Help make the view of our world clearer for all!

Simon Winchester demonstrated with "The Professor and the Madman", his skill at finding stories in cobwebbed corners of 19th Century British history that catch the popular interest. He has done it again with "The Map That Changed the World". It tells the story of William Smith, a seemingly unremarkable man who made one of the most remarkable and important scientific breakthroughs in the 19th century. Smith was an even less likely vessel for genius than the Swiss patent office employee who, a century later, intuited the relationship between energy and matter. He was born the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith, attended no university, and earned his livelihood as a surveyor, coal mining engineer, and drainer of bogs. But while working in coal mines south of Bath in the 1790's, he made an intellectual leap as great as that of Einstein. Smith observed that the sedimentary layers of the rock formations in every mine shaft that he visited lay upon one another in the same sequence. What followed from that observation forever changed the way men searched for coal, gold, oil, and other minerals. The inductive jump Smith made from his observations was even more revolutionary, for it overturned the prevailing veiw of our planet's age. Most natural scientist of the late 18th century were gentlemanly dilettantes who collected fossils, but tacitly accepted Bishop Usher's dating of the earth's birth as having taken place on Oct 27th, 4004 BC. Smith saw that his fossil-bearing "stratifications" provided a means for studying an earth that was far more than 6000 years old. One might think that Smith would have been heaped with honors and rewards for his discoveries, but his hubris and his lack of social and academic status doomed him as surely as any tragic hero of fiction. Just as Smith's obsessive twenty-year effort to map the sub-surface landscape of Britain was coming to fruition in 1815, he was thrown into debtor's prison. After his release, he spent years as an itinerant workman in Yorkshire. Only in his final years was Smith belatedly hailed as the "Father of Geology" by the British scientific establishment. Winchester does a masterful job of bringing William Smith to life and in making the reader care as passionately about Smith's fate as if he were a character on "The Sopranos". In the process, Winchester shows us the topography of British society at the beginning of the industrial revolution.

Simon Winchester's latest work is a good, not fascinating, journey into the evolving Industrial Age of England and all infrastructure that was just beginning in the late 18th century. His unabashed reverence for William Smith isn't objectionable in the book; his constant meandering reminds me more of the canals Smith built than good prose. This is a good book; however, if the reader isn't familiar with the English countryside and particular (read 'quirky') British symbolism and traits, one can get lost quickly in some of the very funny dry wit placed throughout the book.
Winchester's writing style reminds me very much of John Kenneth Galbraith's books; they're formidable in their scope, unarguably correct in their history and excellent reference works. Just be forewarned they take attention to read and you may need to consult the glossary in the back (thankfully it's there) to make sense of all the new terms you'll encounter.
Overall a good book that kept me intrigued enough to recommend it.

I first read Simon Winchester when I came across his book The Professor and the Madman. This wonderful book is the story of the development of the OED. Now he has written a book on William Smith, the man who developed many of the ideas of rock stratification which laid the foundation for modern geology. The ultimate expression of Smith's genius was the production of the world's first geological map which gives this book its title.
Smith's story is a fascinating one and Winchester tells it well. Smith, a rural blacksmith's son, is orphaned and works his way up to being what in today's language we would call a civil engineer. As he works on the construction of coal mines and canals he see the strata of rock and collects fossils, coming to the understanding that the relationship between these things tells us about the age of the rock layers. This concept will have far-reaching repercussions in science.
Winchester also tells us of Smith's struggles to get his work recognized in a class-stratified world of gentleman-scholar-scientists. Along the way, Smith overextends himself financially and finds himself in debtors' prison. After that, he and his reputation seem to fade away only to be resurrected near the end of his life when he begins to reap some of the honors for his work in a field which has since passed him by. Then he fades away again.
Winchester is beginning to make a habit of writing stories bringing to light forgotten people making important discoveries and doing important work that has changed our world. I hope it is a habit he continues. I am already looking forward to the next gem he digs up. He and Dava Sobel are a one-two punch of brilliant modern writing on scholars and scientists who deserve to be remembered.

Simon Winchester has rather made a name for himself taking offbeat and obscure topics and making them accessible and entertaining for the casual reader and I think this may be one of his better books. I actually read this particular history a number of years ago (and I recall enjoying it) but I think I got more out of it in subsequent reads. The difference, I think, is that in the interim between the first and later reads I also read a lot of books about creationism, Darwinian evolutionary theory and the impact an influence of modern geological science on those areas. After reading about the religious uproar which occurred once the immense age of the earth and the form of its structure began to contradict certain long held beliefs it was very interesting to see how the whole fuss got started.

I got this book after hearing an interview with Simon Winchester on NPR. He said that he did a lot of research into the forgotten William Smith's life, and discovered a compelling story that he wanted to share with the world. All of that is very clear after reading this tragic hero's tale.
Unfortunately Winchester is a professor writing a text book. It is a footnote-fest on every page, where clearly these could have been written into the story by a more lucid writer. He uses them as a crutch.
I also felt that the flow of time was awkward; reading from chapter to chapter was like riding in a jerking bus. One minute Smith is in his thirties, the next he's an indeterminate number of years older, and then all of a sudden he's a rheumatic old man.
To give Winchester credit, the book is an easy read, and the passion he has for the story is palpable. He structures the book cleverly with an initial look forward in time and an intermission in modern-day England. But though I'll always remember the story and its hero, sharper prose would have had me evangelizing about Smith and firing off letters to the British Museum to restore to this great man's memory the respect it deserves.
Borrow this book. The fold-out map on the dust jacket is a very nice touch.

What is it about England and its wonderful eccentric scientists? From Darwin and Newton to Harrison and Smith, these folks are just amazing - their love of what they did and their passion to solve a problem are astonishing. And it's not (necessarily) because they were paid to pursue their ventures, but because their curiosity made them do it.
Like Harrison in "Longitude", Smith in "The Map" sets out to solve a problem. In Smith's case it's nothing less than an entire geographical portrait of the British Isles. Never mind that nobody has ever done this, never mind that it will take most of his life, never mind that people will scoff at him, he just went out and did it. And in the process he created a revolution of thinking that we still use today.
The book lags a bit in places as it strive to balance the story of the passion with the details of the stones and fossils, but it's a great tale.

There are two problems with this book, a pop history about William Smith and the birth of the science of geology. First, Mr. Winchester writes in a silly style that's simultaneously conversational and overwrought; while at times he can be amusing, most of the book is kind of a slog to get to the point. The problem is compounded by Winchester's approach to historical details: in true pop history fashion he throws in as many as he can in order to set the scene, but I was never convinced that he was really engaging in the history. Rather, most of the time he comes at it like someone writing bad historical fiction, tossing off useless tidbits about the sudden popularity of umbrellas or the beauty of the Bath landscape. The few serious historical points he does discuss are ruined by their complete irrelevance to the text--'if we wanted to know about that,' readers all over the world should be saying, 'we'd be reading about it instead of about William Smith!' The absence of any footnotes at all only makes things worse.
The second problem, less vital to the enjoyability of the book but a bigger issue overall, is that Winchester suggests a ridiculously simplified and distorted view of the history of science. Perhaps poisoned his youthful experiences at a Catholic school (which somehow come into the William Smith narrative, otherwise I wouldn't mention them), he imagines that people's blind obedience to religion meant that they just didn't think at all before 1750, and after that did it only poorly until the industrial revolution was in full swing. Of course, his theory that beliefs about such weighty matters as humankind's beginnings were unburdened by the complications of too much thought' is ridiculously dismissive of earlier generations of philosophers and scientists from Aristotle to Galileo, and it ignores the fact there were people in every period of history who did their best to understand the world around them based on the tools they had available. This leads Winchester to dramatically overstate Smith's contributions to the intellectual history of the world: yes, his ideas about stratification were a radical departure and a stroke of genius, but could he have come up with them if he hadn't lived in an age of large-scale coal-mines and canals? Why deify him and derogate all his predecessors? It also seems silly to castigate our fore-bearers for not thinking: cause how many people today actually think about, oh, dark matter and the shape of the universe, to say nothing of more relevant things like evolution or climate change? It seems to me that today--as always--most people just accept what they're told, without fully understanding it or working it out for themselves. And there's nothing wrong with that, now or then.
Overall, I'd only recommend this book to people who are desperately interested in William Smith: it fails in any larger sense, and I imagine there must be better books out there for folks who are interested in either the history of geology or early 19th English history in general. And Winchester's book isn't even that good as biography, nor is it particularly fun to read. That said, it does have the occasional, and the subject is quite an interesting one, so perhaps if you're stuck in an airport over the Christmas holidays you might want to give this book a try. Otherwise, though, I wouldn't recommend it.

This was a really interesting book. It seemed very well researched. It had a lot of information about a topic I had never really thought anything about before but it was presented well. The writing wasn't dry and technical so while I learned something I didn't feel like I was back in college. I would definitely look for more books by Winchester.

Simon Winchester successfully and masterfully spins this non-fiction biography with the twists and turns of a well-plotted fiction. It is clearly evident that Winchester left no stone unturned (pun intended) when researching the story behind the story of William Smith, the father of geology.
Our main character and "hero", William Smith, the orphaned son of a blacksmith, is the first person in history to discover and record the different layers of earth (in England) and the rocks and fossils within them. Smith spends most of his adult life literally walking across England to accomplish this allthewhile creating words and concepts (a language, if you will) that we now associate with geology and civil engineering.
According to the class strata and clashes of his day -- rich v. poor, educated v. uneducated, royal v. peasant -- our hero begins, not only his geological journey, but his life, as an underdog and should have no right or chance to succeed at his goal.
Our "villians" (some of the rich and educated and royals I mentioned above) try to discredit, discourage and disallow Smith's work nearly from the moment he started it (and they succeeded some of the time). In the end of the story (and of his life), our underdog is recognized, honored and rewarded by (literally) King and country. He is given the now-a-day equivalent of a pension until his death and the priceless, timeless title of the Father of Geology.
Simply said, this is a wonderful tale of zero to hero. Enjoy the read!
Matthew Munyon

Sometimes sea-changes in thinking come from the most unexpected places. Emerging technologies and an favorable economic conditions facilitated a boom in British inland canal building during the mid-18th century. All that digging revealed previously-unknown, or possibly just unappreciated, fossils. As experience grew, it was observed that the fossils were not just randomly distributed... but what was the pattern? Well, I won't tell the whole story here, but a clever fellow named William Smith applied knowledge of the fossil finds to his knowledge of mapmaking and spearheaded entirely new ways of thinking about each. Canals, fossils, mapmaking, British canal building... this could been dry subject material, but author Simon Winchester delivers an engaging tale without fictionalizing or speculating. This is historical nonfiction dedicated to a very narrow subject(specifically: one man's inventive idea to map the hidden, subterranean world). Within that classification I would say this is the best-written work I have encountered in years. Top recommendation.

Winchester's biography of William Smith is light, entertaining reading. However, I wished that he had followed any one of the related stories a little further. Debtor's prison, the debate with the Ussherians, the debate among the Neptunians and Plutonians, the decline of the scientific dilettante-aristocrat and rise of the professional scientist, or any of a number of other interesting excursions all met at the crossroads of Smith's life and work. The story is at times a little too repetitive as Winchester foreshadows, then tells, than prepares us for what is to come, then tells it, dwells on it, and then constantly notes how certain events (the trip to prison, the theft of his work) impact Smith's later life.

This book might be a light preparation to Stephenson's Baroque Cycle (starting with Quicksilver: The Baroque Cycle #1) to get them used to thinking in terms of overt class rule, or it might appeal to readers who have already enjoyed those stories.

Simon Winchester's follow up to The Professor and the Madman is the rather too grandly titled The Map That Changed the World (William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology). It does not quite live up to this title (how could it?) but it does hit the highlights of the life of William Smith, an important and influential progenitor of modern geology. And what a life, with its great swings of success and failure, betrayal and loyalty, and moments of class warfare. The story is told well by the author although he emphasizes the importance of Smith too frequently instead of letting the reader understand that through the story itself and he minimizes discoveries on the continent that were leading in similar directions as William Smith. Still, all in all, a quick, interesting read.

The book starts out with the protagonist’s origin. The boy’s name was William Smith, who was born in Churchill, Oxfordshire, England in 1769 to a labor intensive family. Smith received a rigid, conservative, and religion based upbringing, but was stimulated by his fascination for rocks and fossils. After his dad died, his mom neglected him and his siblings, so Smith was taken under his uncle’s wing (surprisingly, he was also called William Smith). His uncle sparked his interests further, and by the time he reached his mid-twenties, he found a good job as a land surveyor. From a modern-day perspective, we would refer to this job as a civil engineer, since his job required him to work on the construction of coal mines and canals. This job came right at the perfect time because the industrial revolution had picked up full steam which drove the demand for coal and foreign minerals sky high. This also helped him gather money and good reputation for his research.
His study was initiated when he first noticed similar strata appearing in specific layers under the ground. He became good at predicting where these deposits were located, and what fossils they all yielded. This fascinated him, so he borrowed a lot of money for research, and set out to map out all of the soil and rock phenomena throughout the United Kingdom. Smith spent the next twenty some years traveling throughout Britain, observing the land, gathering data, and chattering away about his theories to those he met along the way, thus acquiring the nickname "Strata Smith." In 1815 he revealed his masterpiece: an eight by six foot, hand-tinted map revealing "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales.”
This map was an aggregate map of all the notable Geological Stratas throughout all of Britain. It was so finitely detailed with specific color coding for each strata. The only areas of Britain that he failed to include into his research (and aggregate map) were the northern half of Scotland and all of Ireland/Northern Ireland. Smith also made sure his map didn’t omit any landmarks or bodies of water.
Despite the amazing intricacies of his work, Smith was snubbed by the scientific community. They decried his map to be false, and his analysis to be inaccurate. This rendered his map as useless, which sent him into bankruptcy. Unable to pay off his loans, he was sent to debtor’s prison. While he lived in the work house behind bars, members of the Geological Society plagiarized his work as their own and made a huge profit from it.
It was only after smith had completed his sentence in debtor’s prison, and after much debate, did they apologize to him and offer him compensation along with a notable title of “The Father of Geology”. It was a modest gesture of them to make, but it was only expressed during the last part of William’s life. The worst part: many people still don’t know why this man is credited for our phenomenal leaps and bounds in the study of geology. This is why the author wrote this publication: to right the wrongs of a multitude worth of wrongful accredits.
Needless to say, the book is brilliant, but I do have one significant caveat. Winchester does a superb job in providing the reader with details…to the point of over doing it. The reader can find the main discoveries and accomplishments of Smith’s life, but before they find them, they have to wade through a lot of finite descriptions that come off as insignificant to the author’s thesis. A fine example of this can be found in the beginning of Chapter 11 on page 163. In an attempt to highlight a parallel between himself and Smith, the author goes on for numerous pages about his childhood memories at a specific beach that Smith treaded upon and used for his research. Like the rest of the book, the section is well written, but it comes off as irrelevant to the overall synopsis of the publication. Fortunately, there are only a few more areas of the book where the author overloads the reader with trivial descriptions. With the trimming of these sections, I think this book would be a perfect read.
Winchester wrote a book about one of the world’s most underappreciated scientists: William Smith. His book exposes how this man who was nicknamed “the Father of Geology” and “Strata Smith” managed to accomplish revolutionary research and have it all stolen from him. Before Smith’s time, there was little to no knowledge about geologic data, or about ancient fossils. His master piece was the first comprehensive geological map ever created. It is because of his work that groups like the US Geological Survey have awesome geographic depictions of the earth’s geology. His research also laid out the necessary background information for reputable figures, like Charles Darwin, to use for their discoveries. It is because of him that we have so much comprehensive knowledge in geological studies, which is why I think Winchester’s book title “The Map that Changed the World” is flawless. Despite his trivial sections, the publication accomplishes its task in describing the successes, sensations, and downturns of this man’s life. This is why I would highly recommend this piece to the average reader.