Blog Post 2/ William Smith-Marie Amelse

William Smith’s map is regarded as the first geological map created, and The Map That Changed The World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester shows why that is important. Winchester sets the context, William Smith was born into seemingly unchanging times, where it appeared that people would be farming communal parish, living under an unquestioned church, and believing that the world began only a few thousand of years ago. However, as it ended up Smith grew up into the Enlightenment, where questions of how and why things are the way that they are became less frowned upon.

William Smith first became interested in the different type of soil when he worked with canal builders. It was during this work that Smith became well acquainted the differing, mostly predictable layers of rock. A key in identifying similar rock layers, or strata, that smith used was the presence of different types of fossils.

After collecting data from several different freelancing jobs across Great Britain, William Smith published Geological Map of Part of Great Britain in 1815. It displays different types of strata using a large array of colors to represent them.  Smith had made this map to aid in the findings of coal, which was the reason he was engineering canals, to transport the coal. True to its purpose, there are few features outside of what was needed to represent the strata. Even then the features represented are waterways, needed to transport the coal, and town names, used as points of reference.

Lastly, an important detail of the map is its sheer size of eight feet by six feet. An unusually large size for a map, most likely intended to show both vivid detail and the vastness of change that Great Britain possessed within its geology.

Smith, William. Geology of England and Wales with Part of Scotland. 1815. “William Smith’s Maps – Interactive.” http://www.strata-smith.com/map/#info.

Winchester, Simon. The Map That Changed the World. Chivers Press, 2002.