The Map That Changed the World (15 page)

In reflective mood Smith seems more the engineer, less the romantic. In middle age he is, and understandably, no longer quite so astonished at the “wonderful order” that he had realized the fossils displayed—an astonishment of discovery which today remains the most haunting aspect of that hastily scribbled note made at the Swan Inn. But the message remains the same, however eloquent or sentimental the prose. A puzzle had been solved. A riddle unscrambled. Now was the time to make something of the answer.

Zigzagiceras zigzag

S
ome Romans had called what we call Bath
Aquae Calidae
—the hot waters. others preferred
Aquae Sulis
, naming the scalding springs in homage to the presiding Celtic water deity, later twinned with their very own Minerva. And for the two thousand years since centurions first erected their stone bathing stalls at this most convenient stopping place on the frontier between the Roman and the Celtic worlds, Bath has been an important, memorably unusual, and often very fashionable place. “Oh!” exclaims Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s
Northanger Abbey
, “who can ever be tired of Bath?”

Nowadays it is the combination of social style, elegance, and fine building stone—tales of the costume parties of Beau Nash, the buildings of a famous father and son, both called John Wood, and the honey-colored oolites of the Middle Jurassic—that still, in the main, impress. The tour groups line up in endless succession before the Royal Crescent and the Circus, the Assembly Rooms and the baths themselves, eager to revel in the pleasures of majestic architecture and public grace. Tens of thou
sands of visitors throng the streets, passing briefly through the compact little city, within its amphitheater of hills. It is, for tourists, one of the score of essential English way stations between the great pile of Buckingham Palace and the artless country cottage of Anne Hathaway.

A few visitors come to stay, and some to study, and an even smaller number to take the hydropathic cure by drinking some of the most foul-tasting mineral waters with which the mantle’s heat has ever supplied us. “Particklery unpleasant,” Sam Weller had said a century ago, in
The Pickwick Papers
. “A wery strong flavour o’ warm flatirons.” But efficacious, they used to say in the century before Dickens, and in those days the finer folk of England would flock to Bath in their thousands, and lodge, imbibe, and amuse themselves, and amuse all the envious world that looked on.

But people also came to Bath to study, discuss, debate, and argue. The citizens of Bath—the population in 1800 had risen dramatically, to thirty thousand—liked to think of themselves as inhabiting the nation’s second city, in matters both social and intellectual. Few of the citizenry had forgotten that Adelard—“England’s first scientist”—a twelfth-century philosopher who had written treatises on the abacus and the astrolabe, had been born in Bath.

Only London attracted finer minds, just as only London had grander parties and soirées. And so in 1777 a move was made to establish and formalize the intellectual ambitions of the city, by creating a society that had as its sole purpose the encouragement of the discussion and dissemination of ideas. The
Bath Chronicle
of August 28 carried an advertisement, placed by a weaver’s son named Edmund Rack, and directed at “The Nobility and Gentry in the Counties of Somerset, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire and Dorset in General, and the Cities of Bath and Bristol in Particular.”

They were to consider, Rack wrote, a proposal for “the insti
tution of a Society in this city, for the encouragement of Agriculture, Planting, Manufactures, Commerce and Fine Arts.” The tone, flattering and seductive to the city’s elite, evidently worked: Twenty-two of the noblest and gentlest-born of Bath’s citizenry turned up at a meeting held a week later in what would later be the Royal York Hotel, and the first of the distinguished intellectual societies for which the city would become famous was formally constituted.

An impressive roll call of luminaries chose over the years to become associated with or full members of the various new bodies—the Bath and West of England Society, the Bath Agricultural Society, the Bath Philosophical Society, the Literary Society, and today’s successors to them all, the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution and the Royal Bath and West of England Society (now based in Shepton Mallet). There was Joseph Priestley (who discovered oxygen); Thomas Malthus (the economist and population expert), Sir William Herschel (who discovered Uranus
*
lurking way at the back of the solar system), Humphry Davy (who discovered sodium and potassium), and one Augustus Voelcker, a German, who was a specialist in the chemistry of cheese and set up a school to teach cheesemaking in Wells, nearby.

And on December 22, 1796, it was announced at the annual meeting that, elected unanimously in consequence of his growing reputation for canal making, his expertise in farming, and his keen new interest in his unromantic freelance business of solving problems with the drainage of fields, membership of the Bath and West of England Society was gained by one of the least noble and least gently born men in the city, the blacksmith’s son from Oxfordshire, William Smith.

His social standing was improving fast. The same annual
meeting recorded that the duke of Bedford, the earl of Egremont, and the earl of Peterborough—farmer-aristocrats all—were in the same company as Smith, and he himself noted that in the years following he came to know each of them well. At the time of his election he had a house on a good terrace in Bath, and his more or less permanent lodgings in the Swan Inn at Dunkerton, which he used when he was delayed in the countryside on canal business. He was well paid, well regarded, sought after. And now, through the Bath Society, he found he was winning friends in influential places—members like the vicars Benjamin Richardson and Joseph Townsend, both of whom were fossil collectors, owners of immense houses in the city—and travelers in the circle of the fashionable; and fellow members like John Billingsley and Thomas Davis—the latter the land steward to the marquess of Bath at his nearby estate at Longleat—who were at the time engaged in writing exhaustive studies of the state of local farming for the Somerset and Wiltshire Boards of Agriculture.

It was this latter pair who first introduced William Smith to the notion of making maps. Although, as we shall see, history has been more generous in its assessment of the importance in William Smith’s extraordinary story of the Reverends Richardson and Townsend, it was actually Billingsley and Davis who gave him the idea that would be central to his coming achievement. For while Smith had no difficulty at all in displaying the vertical extent of the geology he found—he just drew cross-sections and tables as everyone else did—he had the very greatest difficulty in working out how to display the way in which these strata were exposed horizontally, how the outcrops of different kinds of rock were displayed geographically.

Except that one day in late 1798 he suddenly saw just how he could do it. He was reading the latest edition of the Somerset
County Agricultural Report
, and there, buried without comment among the statistics on pigs and the effects of new cattle cross-breeding programs, Smith found an intriguing small map.
Billingsley and Davis, it turned out, had sketched their latest in a series of maps for the report that showed, crudely but effectively, the geographical extent of each of the various soils and types of vegetation that were known in the countryside around Bath.

The maps were detailed and, moreover, they were
colored
: with the use of blues and yellows and greens, all painstakingly applied by hand, they showed the local forests, meadows, pastures. The maps displayed graphically all the nearby hills, rivers, and lakes. And, most important for Smith, they hinted at what lay underneath the surface of the earth, by showing, also in colors, the outcrops of the red earth, the courses of the coal.

In a flash Smith now realized the possibilities. If ordinary agricultural men like Billingsley and Davis were capable of making maps that could display such details, then, with his even greater graphical skills and now a good deal of new and detailed knowledge about just what lay beneath the surface, he himself could draw charts that would show the courses followed by all the rocks that he knew lay down below.

He could use his skills and unusual knowledge, in other words, to draw a brand-new map the likes of which had never been known. He could draw a chart of what could not be seen. And in doing so he could create what had never been created before—
a true geological map
.

His diaries and notes showed that he then puzzled over the finest details—most important, whether he could make the maps relatively inexpensively, by drawing the outcrops in black and white, by using lines of different thickness or by using cross-hatching, to illustrate the different rocks. But he decided he could not. Color, costly though it was to print, and time consuming to apply, was in his view essential for a chart that would be so complex as a map of the unseen underworld. He thus embarked upon a technique of coloring that he was to embrace for the following thirty years of his cartographic career.

He decided first to start his mapping by applying his new
techniques to what he knew—the area in the immediate vicinity of Bath itself. By happy chance in the early summer of 1799 a new book was published,
The Historic and Local New Bath Guide
, printed by A. Taylor and W. Nayler, Booksellers. Its frontispiece turned out to be a handsome map of the city—a map Smith immediately felt he could use as a base on which to superimpose what he now knew about the geology.

Taylor and Nayler’s map was somewhat unusual in appear
ance, not least because it was circular, about fifteen inches in diameter. It was on a scale of one and one-half inches to the mile. Bath lay in the center, like a bull’s-eye. The Avon wandered across from northwest to southeast. The Kennet and Avon Canal was marked, as was the still-not-quite-completed Somerset Coal Canal. The countryside for five miles in either direction was depicted in some detail, with grand houses, stands of trees, parish churches, the turnpikes and common roads, and “with Alterations and Improvements to the present Time.” It was uncolored and, despite holding plenty of important information was designed in a nicely uncluttered way. For William Smith’s purposes it was ideal.

He promptly set to work in his Cottage Crescent house, transferring all the notes from his survey books—oolite with this particular ammonite here, Lias with this
Lingula
there, red marl with these
Ostrea
in this valley, river deposits with clamshells here—onto the base map itself. He extrapolated his dip and strike details, made some logical postulations about where the various strata might end up, then joined the dots—and found he had created on the map a number of shapes, all enclosed and irregular-shaped bodies. They were bodies of which he could now say, and with certainty—
this
one shows where the oolite exists,
this
is the location underground of the Lias. It had never been done before: The unseen world of the underground was all of a sudden on display, seeable, meant to be seen, the hitherto invisible made visible at last.

And to make it not just visible but startlingly apparent to anyone who glanced at his map, Smith then mimicked the technique of Billingsley and Davis and hand-colored the different bodies he had drawn. He colored the outcrop of the oolite a rich shade of yellow; the Lias the dirty blue of one of its building stones; and the red marls of the Trias a brickish red. It was a color scheme that, as it happens, has remained in place in almost all geological maps to this day.

By the middle of the summer of 1799, all was done. What resulted from William Smith’s labors was a map that, for all its age and weatherbeaten look, still has a strangely ethereal beauty. It may not have been of very great use: It was very limited in extent, it showed the outcrop of only three types of rock, and since it had no index it was hardly much of a guide to the underside of the Bath countryside. But the map hangs to this day in what are still called the “apartments” of the Geological Society of London in Piccadilly, and though it is dwarfed by its more famous successors and therefore rarely noticed, it amply deserves to be memorialized. For it is arguably the oldest geological map worthy of its name in existence—primitive, local, and small-scale, true, but nonetheless the oldest, the
ur
-map. The rubric is mostly engraved: “A Map of Five Miles round the City of Bath, on a scale of one inch and a half to a mile, from an Actual Survey, including all the new roads, with Alterations and Improvements to the present time, 1799. Printed for and sold by A. Taylor and W. Nayler, Booksellers, Bath.” There is a handwritten addition, in the elegant cursive hand that over the coming years would become so familiar: “Presented to the Geological Society, February 18
^th
, 1831. Wm. Smith, Coloured Geologically in 1799.”

William Smith was to make still more history during that fateful year. Mary Anning may have been born that year, Vesuvius may have been erupting, the French Revolution may have been ending. But at 29 Great Pulteney Street in Bath, on the cool evening of Tuesday June 11, 1799, history was being made at a small dinner party. There were only three guests—the Reverend Joseph Townsend, the Reverend Benjamin Richardson, and Smith—the “triumvirate,” as one historian was later to say, three of the leading players in the heroic age of geology. As the party drew to a close Smith is reported to have stood up, by invitation, and dictated to his host a document that is still regarded as one of the classics in the annals of science.