What details were expurgated from Smith's diaries? Was the name of the woman admitted to debtor's prison the same day as Smith merely coincidence? Did his conjugal arrangements have any impact upon his exclusion from society? Yet in a sense, these shortcomings add mystery, leaving us to wonder and increasing the book's appeal. Nor do we understand the underlying causes of the hero's problems with money. Our curiosity about the mad wife remains unsated. William Smith is human and makes human mistakes. There are gaps in the 'understory' and the journalist resists filling in the blanks in his sources with fiction or speculative psychology. The tale is well told, tacked to the physical reality of 'the map,' moving back and forth in time as geologists do. The truth is revealed, the significance of the work recognized and the honors come forth while the man of revolutionary vision is still able to receive them As Winchester presents it, Smith's story is one of redemption, although it is society-at-large that changes, redeeming itself and finally celebrating its hero. He was snubbed, allegedly because of his lower class yeoman stock, and he was hounded for money. Yet Smith's contribution was unsung and his work plagiarized. They also ultimately challenged the prevailing literal interpretation of creation as outlined in the Bible and laid the groundwork for Darwin's Theory of the Origin of Species. His discoveries offered an explanation for natural phenomena that had fascinated humans for millennia. He documented the strata, drew charts and finally maps of every outcrop he had inspected, connecting the dots, coloring in the contours that represented geologic time. He studied, hypothesized, experimented, confirmed his theories and applied what he knew.

Yet, he alone was fascinated enough by what he observed and collected to take it further. In his gracious seductive style, The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology tells the fascinating story of one ordinary man, born in the right place, his passion nourished by the ground beneath his feet, who sees 'a hidden fourth dimension.'Īs a child, the orphaned son of a blacksmith raised on an Oxfordshire farm, William Smith used fossils for marbles and worked in the fields where ammonite poundstones were picked to balance the butter scale. He has followed his popular history of the OED, The Professor and the Madman, with the story of another almost-forgotten English innovator.

The Map That changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology Review | The Map That Changed the World by Simon Winchester

The map that changed the world review