The Map That Changed the World: The Tale of William Smith and the Birth of a Science

In the summer of 1815 an extraordinary hand-painted map was published in London. Some eight feet tall and six feet wide, brightly coloured - in sea-blue, green, bright yellow, orange, umber - it presented England and Wales in a beguiling and unfamiliar mixture of lines and patches and stippled shapes. It was the product of one man's obsession with rocks, a passion that sustained him whilst the rest of his life slid into ruin. For nearly 20 years, an Oxfordshire blacksmith's son named William Smith journeyed across Britain investigating and naming the layers of rock beneath his feet. Self-taught and determined, Smith had great expertise in practical geology, and this evolving science demanded a new sort of delineation. The beautifully executed map he produced was the first of its kind and transformed the way in which the world was understood. It was a document that laid the groundwork for the making of great fortunes in oil, iron and tin, and, elsewhere, in diamonds, platinum and silver, and was key to the development of one of the great fields of modern science. Smith's was a remarkable achievement, and all the more astonishing for having been completed single-handedly and without financial or professional support. Shatteringly, such heroic and painstaking work exacted a terrible price: imprisoned for debt, Smith was turned out of his home; his work was plagiarized; the scientific establishment turned its back on his trouble; and Smith's wife was diagnozed insane and he himself fell ill. It was not until 1829 that, in a fairy-tale twist of fate, Smith returned to London in triumph, to be hailed as a genius. Simon Winchester, best-selling author of "The Surgeon of Crowthorne" and himself the holder of a degree in geology, enters the dramatic world of "Strata Smith" to tell his moving and inspiring story. Celebrating the unique geology of the British Isles, "The Map That Changed the World" resurrects the forgotten pioneer whose passion for fossils came above all else.

Review :
How could a map published as late as 1815 have 'changed the world'? Simon Winchester's fascinating book tells the story of William Smith and his literally ground-breaking researches into the stratification of rocks beneath the surfaces of the British Isles, which culminated in the production of a gigantic map which was to have tremendous repercussions for mining and other industries - as well as for science and even religion. Part biography of a self-made man (born the son of a blacksmith), part chapter in the history of the industrial revolution and part story of crucial developments in the new science of geology, Winchester's book also shows how that geology fed into the work of Darwin and others - by definitively revising Biblical accounts of the age of the Earth. It's one of those highly readable non-fiction accounts which cleverly transcends its apparently narrow focus. And it is likely to be as successful as the author's much-acclaimed The Surgeon of Crowthorne.