Unveiling the Secrets of the Earth: William Smith and the Pioneering of Modern Geology

The Shepherd: I sent it directly to my son who is a professional geologist. Thought he would really enjoy it.
It arrived before the scheduled date.
No problems.

United States on Sep 08, 2023

Josephine Parker: I bought one from Heathrow airport twenty years ago got this one for my granddaughter

United Kingdom on Jul 04, 2023

a: It wouldn’t be surprising to hear that the science of geology emerged thanks to the latest hobby craze of rich English people. Fossils collection was a favourite past time of the nobility and aspirational in the late eighteen, early nineteenth century.

Yet that would only be telling half the story. The other half was buried deep until it eventually became too embarrassing to deny – it’s hard to unsee a map. Fossils and their shapes were indeed the topic of conversation with endless speculation on *what* they were. But *when* they were was a question never properly addressed until a not-so-noble man invested all he had, and some more, into his passion for understanding the land as an evolving entity.

The book tells the little-known story of an extraordinary man – whose intellectual abilities were of the rare kind of those who answer a question before it even gets asked – a man who not only went unrecognised for his endeavours, he was also positively marginalised and ignored by the high-society founders of what was then the nascent science of geology.

Despite having single-handedly created the one and only map of Britain with an astonishing resemblance...

United Kingdom on Aug 30, 2022

Vishal Palliyathu: It was definetly a reading adventure - the story of how one mans obsession with strata and rocks and their relative positioning unravelled a whole new science and gave enough foothold for the likes of Alfred Wagner and Darwin to build their theories upon!

Simon Winchesters writing makes it throughly enjoyable - the seed of the idea of drawing and catalagoing the netherworld, his growing obsession with it, the friendships he built, the opportunities he leveraged, the insights he garnered, the cold shoulders, penury, ostracisation and finally, redemption! It sure was a roller coaster of a life and thoroughly enjoyable.

I wish there were more maps and images on the subjects he was talking abouit though. The whole narrative is very English and onw would need a walking visualisation to relate what he was talking about.

India on Nov 28, 2019

C. L. Muralidharan: Simon Winchester has woven a splendid story with a dry subject. The book kept me absorbed for a week. Whenever I decided to take a break from reading a chapter my inquisitiveness got over my lethargy and made me to read the book continuously. What made me obsessed with the book though it contained so many scientific jargons and was dealing with a very dry subject? It is nothing but the sheer style of Simon's writing. Few of my colleague readers may wonder why I am so much obsessed with the author's style rather than with the subject. It is not out of place to mention here that what bogged the rustic geologist, Mr.William in his endeavour , is nothing but the art of expression and the style the lack of which stood as an insurmountable obstacle to his producing two volumes which he promised to his subscribers. Mr.Williams, though a genius, was an uneducated rustic, who could not form his thoughts cogently and express them in simple sentences which stood in his way of producing the promised books to his readers. At this juncture I am reminded of the great English Man, Mr.William Cobbet who was a plough man and who taught himself the elementary principles of Grammar which ultimately...

United Kingdom on Jun 02, 2011

Roger D. Launius: William Smith is a long way from being a household name, but his work represented some of the most important geological investigations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In "The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology," Simon Manchester tells the story of the unlikely hero of British canal surveyor and builder William Smith who realized that he could map the location of fossils and begin to deduce the nature of geology, the age of the Earth, the upheavals of ice ages and other formation events, and the manner in which the British Isles became the British Isles.

Smith labored for decades on his map, laboriously treading the hinterlands of Britain mapping terrain, elevations, rock formations, and the like. In the end he produced the 1815 8.5- by 6-foot, hand-colored map entitled "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales." Others recognized it for it was, a masterpiece, but the bourgeois of the Geological Society of London refused to acknowledge his accomplishment and a cabal kept him from receiving the honors Smith believed were his due. Smith had the map's key discoveries stolen from him, he failed to realize the...

United States on Feb 06, 2011

M. Hillmann: A book on fossils and the establishment of the science of geology - a fascinating and compulsive read - you must be joking!

But Simon Winchester recounts the original thought and breakthrough that William Smith made in the late 1700's that became not just the science of geology but provided the basis that helped Charles Darwin formulate his ideas. And he does it in such an entertaining way.

Andrew Smith's great breakthrough was his realisation that all rocks laid down as sediments at a particular time and in a particular place are laid down with the same characteristics and the same fossils always appear in the same stratigraphical order. Therefore by noting the fossils found, he could forecast the order of strata beneath them and so produce a geological map.

And he went on to geologically map the whole of the British Isles, producing his masterpiece in 1815. He also realised that the more recent strata contained fossils that appeared to be higher forms of life than the fossils in strata lower down and hence provided the evidence that creation was not exactly 6,000 years ago when all species were simultaneously created as was the prevailing belief. Smith...

United Kingdom on Jun 25, 2009

R. E. Rieder: Simon Winchester, trained as a geologist, is a bit fascinated with catastrophes. He has written about the eruption of Krakatoa (Krakatoa) and the San Francisco earthquake of 1906 (A Crack In the Edge of the World) along with many other books on diverse subjects (The Professor and the Madman, for instance, which describes one of the more intriguing contributors to the Oxford English Dictionary). But The Map That Changed the World must, for him, have been a special endeavor as William Smith the creator of the map is especially revered by the English and resides, along with Hutton and Lyell in their geological pantheon, which is obviously crowded. The map, the first truly geological map, covers most of the British Isles and looks remarkably similar to current U.S. geological maps, especially in the use of myriad colors to indicate different formations. (The word "geology" was first used in its modern sense in 1735.) Today, the eight foot by six map hangs behind blue curtains in Burlington House on the north side of Piccadilly.

The map Smith created "...was conceived, imagined, begun, undertaken, and continued and completed [in 1815] against all odds by just one man." It was...

United States on Jun 17, 2006