Smith, William (1769-1839)
English geologist and cartographer
William Smith is often called the founder of English geology, and the founder of stratigraphical geology. His interests in fossils and the countryside led to a method to identify rock strata, along with the first large-scale geological maps of any country. Smith contributed many practical innovations to the embryonic science of geology, and rose from humble beginnings to become a well known and respected scientific figure.
Smith was the eldest son of a village blacksmith, in Churchill, Oxfordshire. His father died when he was still young, and he was sent to live on his Uncle's nearby farm. He attended the small local school, receiving a limited education, but his interest in mathematics was encouraged by friends and relatives, who gave him further tuition. Smith's local reputation as an intelligent boy led him to become employed as an assistant to the surveyor Edward Webb. Webb initially employed Smith to take notes, hold the chain, and other trivial tasks, but was impressed enough to take the eighteen-year-old Smith into his home in Stow and give him an apprenticeship.
Surveying took Smith across much of England, and it was while in Somerset, just outside of Bath, that Smith began to formulate some key ideas. The area had many coal mines, and Smith was allowed to go into many to observe the rock strata. In 1795, he was employed by local landowners to survey a coal transportation canal, and this work offered Smith further observations of the local rocks. He had a keen interest in fossils, taking many samples in the course of his work. Smith began to speculate that there was a link between the types of fossils and the rock they were found in. He also began to make his first maps of the local rock structures.
After his work on the Bath canal was finished, in 1799, Smith traveled widely, performing a number of small engineering and surveying jobs, in which he observed much more of the English rock strata. While Smith discussed his ideas with many influential men, it was not until 1802 that his ideas began to be widely appreciated in the English scientific community. In that year he met Sir Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society. Banks encouraged Smith to produce a book containing his ideas and maps. However, more than ten years were to pass before Smith produced any geological work. The pressures of work and some financial worries forced Smith to postpone and delay his writing.
In 1815, Smith, with the help of map engraver John Cary, finished his first of many geological maps, A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, With part of Scotland. Aside from being the first geological map of an entire country, it was also notable for the innovative use of colored contours to make differentiation clear. The map was well received, being exhibited to the Royal Institution, and Smith received an endowment from the Society for the Encouragement of the Arts, Manufacture and Commerce of fifty pounds.
A year later, over 250 copies of the map had been printed, and while they sold for the hefty price of five guineas (five and a quarter pounds) there were high printing costs. Smith found himself in grave financial difficulties at this time, mainly from a bad investment in a poor rock quarry, and was forced to sell his vast collection of fossils to the British Museum. He also encountered resistance to his rise in social status, in particular from the Geological Society of London president George Greenough. Greenough blocked Smith's membership, and produced a competing map which was cheaper.
Encouraged by his printer, Smith began to publish many more writings and smaller maps of the English counties, and finally he published a work on fossils, the four volume Strata Identified by Organized Fossils (1816–19). This presented Smith's observation that fossils of the same type always appeared in the same rock strata, and so could be used to identify the rocks. Smith also began to give lectures on his ideas in the North of England, where he was accompanied by his nephew John Phillips, who later became professor of Geology at Oxford University.
Smith began to suffer from arthritis, and became quite deaf, and was forced to give up lecturing. He became the land steward of Sir John Johnstone of Hackness, in Yorkshire. This gave him the opportunity to study the area in fine detail, and in 1832 he produced a map of the district to the scale of six and a half inches to the mile.
The Geological Society of London, under a new president, awarded Smith the first Wollaston Medal for his work in 1831, and he was given a number of other awards and degrees in recognition of his contributions to geology. He was also given a government pension, and finally achieved a degree of economic security, if somewhat late in life. He was selected as a member of the group to select the stone for the new Houses of Parliament, but once again he had bad luck with quarries, and the stone failed to withstand the detailed carvings of the ornately decorated buildings. However, Smith actually died before the final selection of stone was made, and his notes suggest he had some reservations about the quality of the stone.
Smith died in 1839, after catching a chill on his way to a meeting of the British Association in Birmingham. His work was mainly practical, and he stressed the commercial benefits that could be gained from his work. His mapping of strata enabled others to deduce areas of likely coal sources, and his many county maps remained in use for decades after his death. Some historians have commented that he was lucky that England has such 'well behaved' rock strata, as opposed to continental Europe where alpine folding made interpretation difficult. However, Smith should still be given credit for recognizing details others did not, and for making his ideas public.
Fossil Record; Geologic Map; Stratigraphy
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