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William Smith, 1769-1839, has been called the ‘Father of English Geology’. His pioneering map of 1815, depicting the geology of England, Wales and part of Scotland, helped to shape the economic and scientific development of Britain, just as the country was experiencing the Industrial Revolution.
William Smith was born in rural Oxfordshire in 1769. The son of the village blacksmith, Smith was the eldest of five children. After elementary education at the village school where he developed a liking for geometry and drawing, he decided to teach himself the skills of surveying, possibly because there were an increasing number of openings for that profession. At the age of 18, he was employed by Edward Webb, a surveyor in a nearby town, and subsequently, in 1791, he set up a business on his own.
As a boy, Smith had developed an interest in the exposures of rock and the fossils which were to be found locally. As an adult, his surveys of land that would be suitable for building canals, and for sources of building stone and coal in other parts of England, led to a great increase in his knowledge and awareness of various geological features.
As he travelled, he found the strata* that he was familiar with in the south of England were repeated in other areas, with some outcrops – the rocks emerging above ground – stretching right across the country. Coal miners were already aware of the occurrences of regular successions of workable coal seams. But on a larger scale, Smith began to recognise that sedimentary rocks could be identified by the fossils they contained, and that these rocks were always arranged in the same order. Smith’s discovery that beds of rocks can be distinguished by the fossils found in them was a concept virtually unrecognized by geologists of that period. Working on this principle, Smith was able to draw up a table of successive strata which could be applied in any other locality – an early version of the geological column.
