Customer Reviews

The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology (P.S.)

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In the last unit of my semester earth science class at an Orange County, California high school, I frequently come face to face with fundamentalist Christian views of the geological time scale. I'm told that the scale is a fiction made up to support the theory of evolution. I explain to my students that the pattern of strata and fossils that guided [and still guide] the building of the geological time scale is very real and exists independently of the explanation of the pattern. I explain that people like William 'Strata' Smith and others who followed him established that the pattern exists years before Charles Darwin convinced the scientific world that evolution happened. I don't want to kill their faith, but I won't lie to them. Now Simon Winchester has given us a book that I can hand to my students and say, "here's how William Smith figured it all out."

In The Map That Changed The World, Simon Winchester [in a very British and somewhat hyperbolic fashion] tells engagingly of the life of William 'Strata' Smith, surveyor, self-taught geologist, and maker of the first geologic map. I've known of Smith since my days as a student geologist [I can't recall that my professors ever mentioned the great map; their emphasis was always on Smith's discovery of the principle of faunal succession, or as Winchester writes in the book, "In his opinion, he wrote, all the rocks that had been laid down as sediments at a particular time in a particular place are laid down in a way that has much the same characteristics, and most particularly just the same fossils, and always appear in the same vertical order, in the same stratagraphical order, no matter where they are found."], but Winchester takes the story of Smith way beyond the brief tales of the canal digger who was fascinated by fossils that are told in the typical college class. Smith has become an even bigger hero of mine now that I know of his struggles with the class distinctions found in England in the early 1800's and that he was all too human enough to have a problem sticking to a budget. I read the paperback since my signed first printing of the hardback is too beautiful to handle [the dust jacket of the hardback folds out into the geologic map of England and Wales that Smith made]. My only complaint, and it's a teenie tiny one, is that Winchester's hyperbolic writing style sometimes comes very close to crossing the line from biography into hagiography.

I highly recommend The Map That Changed The World to anybody with an interest in geology, paleontology, cartography, history, England in the 1800's, or the ups and downs of a fascinating life. Get the hardback for the jacket, but read the paperback and then donate it to your local junior high, high school, or public library.

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.

This is a potentially fascinating book for readers who like biography, geology, landscape, England, rocks, or fossil ammonites. All right, I admit I was suckered by the cover: the hb dust jacket unfolds into a single large geological map of England, Wales, and southern Scotland! It is The Map That Changed the World in 1815 by revealing the rock strata beneath an entire country: the existence of time and order, of coal beds, building stone, ores, and soil types, all now made predictable. The fact this 1/13th size version of the immense hand made and coloured original by William "Strata" Smith won't stand magnification might have warned me about the text within. Once beyond the exciting promise of the clever jacket and quality presentation I was increasingly disappointed.

Winchester's biographical construction of Smith's life, while chronological overall, casts Smith's remarkable rise from the farm, and his wonderful scientific observation and insight, as a morality play against 18th century class prejudice and religion ("the blind acceptance of absurdity"!) taken quite out of historical context. Aside from Smith never having been involved in religious controversy (see pp. 195-96), the authorial tactics make it hard to follow Smith's story rather than Winchester's arch exegesis. Despite the frequent assertions of how earth-shaking was Smith's map, the book is such a farrago of description, quotation, flashforward, biography, travel, snide remark, foreshadowment, reconstruction, admiration, speculation, flashback, asides, suggestion, British nostalgia, coincidence, and digressive (but not scholarly) footnotes that the revolutionary consequences of Smith's innovations in stratigraphy, fossil assemblage, and mapping are buried and never come across coherently and convincingly. Because the author implies that Smith's recorded life and journal were boring and pedestrian, he must think it necessary to gussy up the very real scientific discoveries with this potpourri of diversions. Nevertheless, Winchester's own text is mared by banality, repetition, and common cliche, and larded with his anachronistic prejudices.

I'm glad I read this book, but the book's handsome presentation set my expectations way too high. I don't know that I've ever encountered an author who so gets in the way of his subject. His choice of supplemental illustrations also turns out to be off the mark, largely lacking maps of place names (which are particularly obscure to non-English folk) and entirely lacking views of the specific countryside that was critical to Smith's revelations. Other contemporary geologists are used as foils for the hidden excellence of Smith, rather than to fill out the real context and consequences of his discoveries. So, if you want to read something truly exciting about geology or landscape, seek out John McPhee's four books describing and interpreting a cross section of America. For a better understanding of Smith's historical context, see The Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.

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If ever you can judge a book by its cover, this is it. The copper embossed dust cover hints at the treasure buried within. From its binding, to the choice of paper to the fine etched illustrations, this is a very classy book.

Winchester takes us aboard one of the most effective literary time machines ever to land on a bookshelf. His writing sweeps us back 200 years to an England that was going through an industrial, scientific and social revolution.

Coal was king. Coal was the fuel for steam power. In turn, steam drove Britannia's economic engines.

William Smith was skilled as a geologist, engineer and cartographer. His observations and maps allowed landowners to discover and exploit the coal resources that lay beneath their land.

Smith's science went well beyond that of defining the strata containing the valuable coal. He devised the concept of stratigraphy, which would allow the relative age and spatial distribution of sedimentary rocks to be quantified.

It was this work, that inspired Smith's fellow geologist Charles Lyell to write "The Principles of Geology". When Charles Darwin went on his voyage of discovery it was the geological insights of Lyell and Smith that allowed Darwin to conceive of the vastness of the geological time scale. It is Winchester's thesis that Smith's map changed the world because of this direct influence on the most revolutionary scientific thinker of the 19th Century.

In the mid-1800s thanks to Darwin, geology was considered to be "The Father of Sciences".

The beauty of Winchester's writing is his evocation of the world in which Smith lived 200 years ago. His description of the English landscapes brings home to us the relationship between the underlying rocks and the aesthetics of the natural scenery we see around us.

Winchester's skills as a travel writer shine through. He surveys not only the landforms but also the social and political landscapes of this era. His clever use of the vocabulary of the era gives us a world inhabited by such people as beadles, tipstaffs and summoners. We travel in a conveyance called a myrmidon. His research is impeccable. We learn that there was an actual prison in London called "The Clink", and that the game of rackets or squash was invented in a debtors jail.

This book deserves its status as on of the great books of 2001. It should encourage readers to go back to Winchester's early work, particularly his travel writing. For readers who wish to learn more about Smith's influence on science should read Lyell's "Principles of Geology" which still in print as a Classic. This is the book that Charles Darwin took on his voyage of discovery. "The Map That Changed the World" will take you on your very own voyage of discovery.

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.

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.

"The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology," by Simon Winchester, proved to be a bit of a disappointment. It's a wonderful book, and I'm sure for those who make their life in geology it's an excellent read, but for me it was a let down.

The problem may be that Winchester is too good a writer, or too accurate a biographer, to put down any details of which he's not 100% certain. Add to that the fact that the source materials focus on William Smith's professional work almost to the exclusion of any personal detail, and you have what should be a compelling personal journey that winds up reading more like a geology text in too many chapters.

Smith's place in history was assured by his 1815 publication of a map of England showing the geological strata and graphically demonstrating his theories that one could tell the age of the rocks from examining the fossils found within. This was radical stuff in 1815, and the work that led to this map took Smith some 30 years. Along the way he picked up a wife, who was possibly crazy, and adopted a nephew, who became his assistant, had business and financial troubles, which led to his being held in debtor's prison, and had a long running class-based feud with England's scientific establishment, which led to his works not being properly recognized for many years after their publication.

Unfortunately, only the last aspect of Smith's life is covered in any detail because that's all he wrote about in his own journal, or is covered in other source material. About the wife we're told that she was a burden to him, often sick, probably crazy, and possibly even a nymphomaniac. We're told all that, but we're never given examples, or are told how Smith felt about her. Did he love her anyway? Did they ever try to have children of their own? Did she embarrass him publicly? We don't know. About the nephew we're told that Smith took over his care when his sister and brother-in-law died, and that he became his assistant, but we're told nothing of their personal relationship. Was their's a close, familial relationship, or only one of master or mentor to apprentice? We don't know. And such is the frustration with the book (mine, at least).

What's left is endless descriptions of the various layers of the earth's crust, and how Smith could tell if an outcropping belonged to the Jurassic or Cretaceous periods.

I picked up this book because I loved Winchester's previous "The Professor and the Madman" so much. That's a book that's rich in personal detail, and is as important and fascinating in the descriptions of the lives of the subjects as it is in the descriptions of their professional works. "The Map that Changed the World" is likely stunning for students of geology, but may bore beyond belief the reader who doesn't care or know about item one of earth science.

So - In the end, I suppose a mixed review. If you get this joke (and think it's funny): "Subduction leads to orogeny" - or, if you have a bumper sticker that says "Stop Plate Tectonics" - Then this is a five star book that you will love every page of. If you don't even care to look up any of those words, then this is a three star book you should avoid. Which averages out to four stars: An occasionally fascinating and well-written book that is often dry and disappointing.

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.

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 book made interesting reading and I would say it was well written. However, it only gets two stars because of the sloppy editing... if I'm not an expert and caught some errors on the first read, how many more are there that I didn't notice. For example, the author states that stromatolites and trilobites were extinct by the end of the Carboniferous Era. Well, in fact, it's pretty widely accepted that trilobites lived past the Carboniferous, and stromatolites still exist today. After reading the book, I found Stephen Jay Gould's review of it; he noticed not only substantial errors in natural history, but in the accounts of people's lives and motivations. There's no excuse for this kind of poor work.