The Map That Changed the World (39 page)

*
Smith was to feel somewhat embarrassed in later years about his forebears’ determined ordinariness, and he tried long and hard to prove that through his mother he was a descendant of Sir Walter Raleigh. He convinced no one and eventually abandoned the quest.

*
James Hargreaves, whose mechanical spinning jenny was destroyed by fearful proto-Luddites, and Samuel Crompton, whose spinning mule was a hybrid of its two predecessors, came only a little later.

*
William Smith was born during the administration of the sixth and least distinguished, the duke of Grafton, who acted as caretaker between the administrations of William Pitt the Elder and Lord North.

*
William Smith was born during the administration of the sixth and least distinguished, the duke of Grafton, who acted as caretaker between the administrations of William Pitt the Elder and Lord North.

†
The radical politician in whose memory the famous actor Junius Brutus Booth named the son who would assassinate Abraham Lincoln in April 1865.

‡
There is a small, Smith-related coincidence here. Edmund Burke made what was perhaps his most famous speech in 1788 when he was opening for the Commons the impeachment proceedings against Warren Hastings, the governor-general of India who, by a coincidence of which the Smith family was only too well aware, had also been born in Churchill. Unlike Smith’s small cottage on Junction Road, the house in which Warren Hastings was born still stands. There is some greater fairness in the nomenclature of contemporary geography, however—notably the existence in modern Churchill both of a Hastings Hill and a William Smith Close.

*
Joseph Priestley and Erasmus Darwin, along with Josiah Wedgwood and James Watt, were all Lunaticks, members of Birmingham’s Lunar Society, which met monthly on the occasion of the full moon. Freethinking, radical ideas were welcomed by a group that was principally involved in applying scientific discovery to the newly flourishing world of industry.

*
The word is first used in English in its modern sense in 1735, though only rarely—and probably not until 1795 can it be considered a mature and full-fledged concept. There was no mention of geology in the 1797 Third Edition of the
Encyclopædia Britannica
; but the Fourth, which came out in 1810, had a lengthy entry, the science by now fully established.

*
Elizabeth’s own son, as we shall see, was to become professor of geology at Oxford University, due almost wholly to the tutorial inspiration of his uncle William.

*
Plot is seen by some historians of the science as having been a much-overlooked contributor to our knowledge of the Jurassic era. Naming an echinoid after him, while to outsiders seeming to damn with faint praise, perhaps helps somewhat to redress the balance.

*
The first denial of the existence of phlogiston, the so-called “inflammable being” that was believed to be contained in all burnable objects, came with Lavoisier’s discovery of oxygen in 1775. But throughout Smith’s youth, phlogiston was the prime explanation behind flammability: Chemists only formally decided otherwise in 1800.

*
I would never wish to dislodge my hero, William Smith, from his pedestal of honor as the father of English geology. But it has to be admitted that John Rawthmell’s observation was more than prescient: One has only to glance at the modern geological map of Britain, or indeed at William Smith’s own, to see how very right he was, and why.

*
Although Hooke managed to avoid the strictures of the church for saying so, Nicolaus Steno, who published his ideas in 1669, was not so fortunate, being compelled by the dogmatic authority of the Copenhagen bishops to accept Ussher’s unprovable notion that the world was 5,772 years old. He eventually gave up science altogether in disgust, and joined the church, the poacher remaining as gamekeeper until his death in 1689.

*
As it happens, the duke’s cousin, the eighth earl of Bridgewater, is also connected with this story, though in a wholly unrelated way. He was a clergyman and a keen champion of the idea that humankind had been divinely created. In 1829 he left money to pay for a treatise that proved it: Geologists, many of them Smith’s contemporaries and disciples, entered the contest.

*
Mr. Fenning was not knowingly related to one of the more notorious criminals of the day, a domestic servant named Elizabeth Fenning who allegedly poisoned her employers’ family by serving them dumplings laced with arsenic. She was widely believed innocent, but was hanged anyway.

*
Lady Jones, the widow of the baronet Sir William Jones, was the great-grandmother of the astonishing Angela Burdett-Coutts, who was a great patron of geology, and who endowed two lectureships in the science at Oxford.

*
A guinea, equivalent to a pound and a shilling, is a classically British and very informal unit of currency—with neither a coin nor a bill to formalize it—that is still used today (despite Britain’s having adopted decimal currency in 1971) in some circles, such as the buying and selling of racehorses and sheep. There used to be a one-guinea coin, struck from gold from the eponymous nation, but only its name and worth survive, and today the word is only a vague and ephemeral throwback to more casual financial times.

†
Smith’s obsessive interest in cartography rarely left him, and his jottings give an indication of how his mind was working when first he came to Rugborne. “[M]y residence was most singular, it being nearer to three cities than any other place in Britain: it is 10 miles from Bath, 10 from Bristol and 12 from Wells.”

*
This appears to be the first time that William Smith uses a term deriving from the word
strata
, the study of which would so dominate his life as to become his nickname: To all nineteenth-century England he would be simply Strata Smith. The
OED
suggests that the words
stratum
and
strata
, meaning a layer or layers of sedimentary rock, became current in England at the end of the seventeenth century; Smith himself was the first to use
stratigraphical
in 1817;
stratification
made its first appearance in 1795.

*
In Korea there has long been a tacit recognition that small earthly processes, carried out over millions of years, can in the end have a geologically significant result. There is in Korean mythology a famous measuring unit that denotes a very long period of time. To gauge how long that period is, one is asked to imagine a mountain, made of solid granite, exactly one mile high. Once every thousand years an angel flies down from heaven and brushes the summit of the hill with her wings. The unit of time represents the number of years it would take for the angel and her summit-brushing wing to erode the mountain down to sea level. Given long enough, of course, she would do it. As would a stream, or even the wind—providing that geological time was encompassing enough—and was far, far longer than the mere six millennia allowed by Bishop Ussher.

*
A lot less than 9,000 vertical feet in terms miners would understand, since the coalfields were set on their edge, or otherwise deformed, by the Variscan orogeny. The deepest pit in 1792 was a mere 450 feet; and when the mines closed in 1973, the deepest was the Braysdown Colliery, 1,700 feet. To get to the lower level in a coalfield where the seams are so up-ended, the mines had to be sunk in the right place, and so did not have to be very deep.

*
The Lias—the name is variously thought to be Old French, or a Cornish quarriers’ term for “layers”—is a bluish, highly fossiliferous argillaceous limestone, used in building and the making of tombstones as it is hard and takes a high polish. It occurs in the geological table at the lower end of the Jurassic, just above the Triassic. Although the respective ages of the formations were unknown to Smith, he will have seen that the Lias occurs above what he and his collier colleagues called the red earth, or the red marl, and which in turn lies unconformably above the coal measures.

*
By this he meant the more southerly arm of the new canal, the so-called Radstock Line—although it is something of a mystery that he refers to “two valleys,” when the Radstock Canal surely had only one.

*
Strachey, in his
Observations of the Different Strata of Earths and Minerals
, written in 1727, speculated that the layering of the rocks in Somerset had been caused by their being rolled up by the rotation of the earth.

*
This is the same Robert Plot after whom the Chedworth Bun, or milkmaids’ pound stone,
Clypeus ploti
, was named. See chapter 3.

*
Highwaymen were a menace during the period, and travelers encountered them so frequently that women were advised to carry two purses, one for the robber, one for themselves. The short-barreled blunderbuss, invented in Germany, was a wildly inaccurate weapon, but highly effective at disposing of a highwayman at close range.

*
The row of seven houses still stands, renamed “Bloomfield Crescent.” It is a perfect specimen of Bath Georgian architecture, but it now stands isolated, an oasis of old civility among a great wen of the new and the semidetached.

*
She wrote to Buckland, the flamboyant and eccentric professor of geology at Oxford, about her discovery of the baby plesiosaur, well knowing that he would find delightful her observation that the animal’s neck “had a most graceful curve,” and more charming still her discovery that, lodged above its pelvic bone, right where its colon would have passed, was a newly formed coprolite, a fossilised version of the item that, had it lived, the beast was just about to leave steaming in its wake.

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And indeed will appear in the
New DNB
, thanks to the efforts of her champion, Hugh Torrens.

*
Bombazine is a thick fabric that, in black, is often used as mourning dress; camlets are fine cloths woven from angora or mohair, as fashionable in the eighteenth century as pashmina was to become in more recent times.

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His
Walks through Wales
was an eighteenth-century bestseller; his
English Diatesseron
somewhat less so.

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He wanted to name the first telescopically discovered planet
Georgium Sidus
, in honor of George III, but was eventually persuaded to name it after the old Greek god who had fathered Saturn and the Titans.

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He was immensely tall and well built, prompting his Highways Trust colleagues to call him the Colossus of Roads.

†
Through perhaps not so odd, since his father, Chauncey Townsend, MP, owned several tin and lead mines in Devon and Cornwall.

*
The former name of what was to become the Norwegian capital city of Oslo (as well as, derivatively, an early word for a parallel turn on skis).

†
There is some confusion about the precise spelling of the landlord’s name: The unusual single
n
spelling appears in all the latter court papers, when the relations between Smith and the owner of Midford Castle had deteriorated.

*
One of these surviving maps, rediscovered in 1973, shows the precise location of one of the more mysterious engineering marvels of the canal, the huge canalboat lift, or caisson, that was built instead of a flight of locks outside the village of Combe Hay. It was basically an enormous water-filled iron box, mounted on four giant geared legs: The coal barge sailed into the box, which was sealed at both ends, cranked ponderously up sixty feet to the level of the upper reaches of the canal, and the barge released into the higher level. It took an extraordinary feat of technological
brio
to make it; and it was an extraordinary tragedy that it never really worked, was abandoned, and was eventually replaced by a time-consuming, water-using set of locks (until, that is, the canal was replaced—and ruined—by a railway line). Industrial archaeologists for years searched for evidence of the caisson, buried under two centuries worth of mud and neglect: the Smith-Cary map found in 1973 shows its precise location. It was known that a chestnut tree had been planted on the abandoned site some time in the early nineteenth century: it still exists today, and at the very spot indicated by Cary’s venerable map.

*
A common bane of most geologists’ otherwise pleasant existence is the person who, all too commonly, offers up a beach stone with the request that he or she
please identify it
. It is all but impossible to hazard a reasonable guess at what a smooth, well-weathered, and near-spherical piece of rock might be. If it is freshly broken, and the new-fractured edge inspected with magnifying glass and tested with acid, a tentative ID might be made. Grinding out a thin section of the rock and using a microscope with a polarizing filter to view its minerals would make its naming even simpler and more certain. But most people on beaches do not want their finds to be broken in half or sliced to a tenth of a millimeter: Better, then, that such gatherers take their trophies home unidentified, to remain—like most rocks and the processes that made them—something of an enigma.

*
He gave long and windy sermons until his retirement, whereupon he embarked on a writing career with books like the encouragingly titled
Nugae Politicae: Solitary Musings on Serious Subjects, by an Aged Man
and the almost equally unalluring
Diary of a Retired Country Parson, in Verse
.

*
While he was working at Crook’s farm, Smith made a discovery of another horizon, that of a friable sandstone containing a fossil called
Sigaloceras
, to add to his slowly expanding collection of strata. He called this one Kelloway’s [
sic
] stone, after the numerous road-stone quarries near the village of Kellaways [
sic
]: He placed it in the upper subdivision of what in his 1799 table he had called simply number 4, “Sand and Stone.” The horizon was later to be called Kellaway’s [
sic
] Beds, and the name of a geological stage, Callovian, was derived from it—the one name that Smith has bequeathed to a major period of earth history. He also gave the name Cornbrash to the limestone immediately below, using the quarrymen’s term
brash
, and adding to it the fact that corn seemed to grow well in the fields above its outcrop.