Last Good Read:The map that changed the world: The tale of William Smith and the birth of a science.
Title:
The map that changed the world: The tale of William Smith and the birth of a science.
Author:
Simon Winchester
Publication
date:
2001
ISBN:
0670884057
Keystage:
Keystage 3
Description:
This is the heart-warming story of William Smith, the son of an Oxfordshire blacksmith, and his life-long quest to produce a geological map of Britain. It is also an excellent insight into the world of Georgian and Victorian snobbery, of the class-based society of the Industrial Revolution, but ultimately of the triumph and belated recognition given to William Smith for his tremendous achievement of producing the first ever geological map.
Largely self-taught by observation in his 'proper' jobs of canal-building and coal mining, William became the first person to age rocks by the fossils within them, and produced a stratigraphy that is still largely adhered to today. His battle for recognition reflects the peculiarly British divide between the practical and the gentleman amateur in the development of the then new science of Geology and the Geological Society of London. And as in all good reads, good triumphs over evil in the end and William Smith gets the true recognition his endeavours deserve.
This book sheds as much light on social history as on the beginnings of Geology, and is a rattling good read.
