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 18th, 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.
Townsend, whose house it was and who was thus the persuasive genius behind Smith’s decision to commit his ideas to paper, was in all senses a clever, very well-connected, and most unusual man. He had trained as a doctor, but had then taken holy orders and moved in to the great rectory at Pewsey in Wiltshire, which had been bought for him by his father, who was the local member of Parliament. He appears to have had the breadth of intellect for which the era’s intellectual aristocracy was renowned—he taught himself Hebrew, wrote a large book on philology, was fascinated by canals (which is why Richardson first introduced him to Smith at a Bath Society meeting), and was an active member of the regional Highways Trust, which supervised the local turnpikes.*
Townsend had an electrifying manner as a preacher—“his voice at all times sepulchral, but when exerted, of passing loudness admirably adapted to arouse, denounce and alarm”—and for a while was appointed personal chaplain to the headstrong Methodist aristocrat-evangelist Selina Hastings. But then he had a serious falling-out with her over where and when he could preach, and for several years in the 1750s he and a group of like-minded holy men who had been chaplains at her huge collection of churches were pursued by her agents in a fantastical cat-and-mouse game as they preached, without her permission, in barns and open fields and under market crosses, all across the English West Country. A play was written about the affair, with Townsend satirized as the Reverend Timothy Wildgoose.
He eventually fled to Ireland in 1761, and in County Kerry took up an interest—which one might think odd for a doctor and man of the cloth—in a mining company.†He turned out to be fascinated by minerals and by fossils, and managed for the rest of his days to commingle his studies of evangelism with those of geology—to the extent that when in 1790 he published the one book for which he is known, Journey through Spain, it was crammed with information about the geology and mineralogy of the Iberian Peninsula. Considering the fine irony involved, it bears repeating that the first remark he made when Richardson introduced him to William Smith was how much better his Spanish book might have been had he known of Smith’s theories about the strata, superposition, and the use of fossils in recognizing what and where they were.
Richardson himself was a much less daunting figure—the vicar of Farleigh Hungerford (a living—as the job of vicar in a rural parish of the Church of England was then and still is known—in the patronage of one Joseph Houlton, who was in turn to become a keen supporter of Smith and his mapmaking endeavors), and the owner of a huge old library and collection of fossils and rock samples in his home, Farleigh Castle. Richardson met Smith at a gathering of the Agricultural Society. They talked about fossils, and Richardson invited the younger man home to inspect the collection he had amassed. It was then that the first connection was made, the serendipitous meshing of one set of skills with another.
For while Richardson had a magnificent collection of fossils in his town house on Lisbon Terrace, Bath, he had no idea which belonged where in the order of strata, no clue as to which lived earlier, which later. All the fossils were as a result jumbled together, or put into drawers not according to their relative age but according to their type—all the ammonites placed on one shelf, all belemnites on another, all crinoids here, all graptolites there, all brachiopods in one compartment, and so on.
When Smith inspected the fossil cabinet he was both appalled and challenged. He told Richardson that, if he was allowed, he could organize the vicar’s collection so that all the fossils would be arranged in their correct, logical, properly created stratigraphical order—with the oldest and least advanced at the bottom, the most sophisticated and complex and youngest at the top. Richardson, who could barely tell one fossil from another, readily agreed. The young man set to work—and within a day the entire amassment of the amateur paleontologist-vicar had been rendered into a scientifically accurate column by the efforts of this extraordinary surveyor-professional.
Richardson was, by all accounts, astonished. No diary records his words, but Smith later said that he explained to Richardson that what he had shown him applied everywhere, and not just to the fossiliferous rocks and specimens in this one collection. No, he said—and this, for the first time to a man with at least some scientific training—the same strata are always found in the same order of superposition, and they always contain the same peculiar fossils.
Richardson grasped in an instant the importance of what was being said. He immediately made contact with his friend Townsend, who suggested that Smith’s theories be put to the test. If Smith was right, then he should be able to predict with some accuracy what rocks would appear, and what fossils would be found, on both the slopes and at the summit of a prominent nearby hill where Dundry Church had been built.
Smith rose to the task. From his calculations he reckoned the hills would be capped by the limestone of the inferior oolite; and that on the western side of the hill i
t would be possible to find a series of very specific fossils, peculiar to what is now known as the Lower Jurassic. The three men hired a horse-drawn carriage and hurried northwestward to Dundry Hill. Every few minutes they stopped the coach, climbed down, inspected the outcrops of rocks—and on every single occasion, in terms of outcrop, thickness, lithology, and fossil content, William Smith was right.
“The effect of this…was decisive,” wrote a contemporary biographer of Smith.
In general literature and especially in natural history Mr. Smith was immeasurably surpassed by his friends. But they acknowledged that from his labours in a different quarter, a new light had begun to manifest itself in the previously dark horizons of geology, and they set themselves earnestly to make way for its auspicious influence.
The dinner at Great Pulteney Street that evening was a classic example of such men “earnestly making way” for the coming effects of Smith’s thinking. It is not known what was eaten or what if anything was drunk. What is known is that the three men spent much of the time discussing what they had found at Dundry, what Smith had accomplished with the collections at Fairleigh Castle, what theories had now been tested, proved, and confirmed. It remained now, at least in the view of Joseph Townsend, to make a tabular list of the strata of which the three men were well aware—a summary, in fact, of all they knew about the region’s rocks, and where each fitted in with respect to all the others.
Richardson and Townsend sat at the dining table, now cleared of all china and glassware. A large piece of paper, the size of a blotting sheet (about twenty-six by thirty-four inches), was placed on the surface. Townsend took out his quill pen and sand shaker. Smith gave him a ruler, and with this he drew five long lines across the page—one horizontal, four vertical. Above the horizontal lines, and in the five boxes thus created by the intersections with the vertical rules and the paper edges, Townsend then wrote, according to Smith’s dictation: “Strata, Thickness, Springs, Fossils, Petrifactions &c, &c.,” and finally, “Descriptive Characters and Situations.” Smith then cleared his throat, and began his dictation.
The list that followed enumerated twenty-three horizons—twenty-three bands of rock that were sufficiently different from one another, and recognizable from the fossils within them, to be counted as separate and unique. The list began with the youngest, and it ended with the oldest. It began with the chalk, which Smith listed as number 1, and ended with the coal, squeezed in almost as an afterthought at the very bottom of the page, as number 23.
In between were twenty-one strata of rocks that had, in many cases, hitherto passed unnamed and unnoted. Now, at a scratch of Joseph Townsend’s pen and a shake of blotting sand, they were formally christened by William Smith. Not all were given names—the first four below the chalk were merely described by their lithologies. The names that some older horizons were given did not go down well. The geological establishment of the day suggested that some of the appellations were crude and, worst of all to the refined manners of the day, abominably ugly. Nonetheless, in many cases they have stuck, and at least four of them remain in scientific use in England today.
Below the 300 feet of chalk, Smith declaimed before the others, were first 70 feet of sand. Then 30 feet of clay. Then 30 more feet of clay and stone. And 15 feet of clay. Then 10 feet of the first of named rocks, forest marble. And 60 feet of freestone. A narrow band, no more than 6 feet thick, of blue clay, and then only another 8 of yellow clay. Then, most familiar still today, 6 feet of what would be called fuller’s earth. And 80 feet of what Smith called bastard fuller’s earth, complete with fossils—“striated cardia, Mytilites, Anomiae, pundibs, and Duck-muscles”—that the narrow band above did not contain.
Below that came the stratum labeled number 12, 30 Feet of Freestone. Then 30 Feet of Sand, 40 of blue marl, 25 of Blue Lias, 15 of White Lias, 15 of Marl Stone, 180 feet of the much-vaunted Red Ground (or Red Earth, or Red Marl, depending on where Smith was writing, and to whom), and “milstone [sic],” followed by an unrecorded thickness of Pennant Stone, then a band of Greystones, another of Cliff—whatever that might be (though whatever it was was crammed with “ferns, olive stellate plants, Threnax parviflora, or dwarf fern palm of Jamaica)”—which trended, almost imperceptibly, into the coal.
The biggest change between any of the strata was the one that occurred between the Millstone and the Pennant Stone. Beneath the Millstone bed, dictated Smith, “no fossil, shells or animal remains are found; above it, no vegetable impressions.” The boundary between the two, Smith had already noticed, was unconformable. That it had so vastly different a fossil population—only animal remains above, only plant remains below—indicates something we know only too well today: that this unconformity marks a vitally important geological boundary.
It was the base of the Permo-Triassic period of geologic time, and the top of the Carboniferous period. It was and is, in other words, a highly observable, universally recognized, and now internationally agreed moment in the earth’s long and unstoppable history—and William Smith, Joseph Townsend, and Benjamin Richardson, were the first men to witness the newly discovered fact of this moment being committed to paper. The record written that evening would ensure that this geological junction point would remain in human beings’ knowledge of their world, and of themselves, forever.
For the first time the earth had a provable history, a written record that paid no heed or obeisance to religious teaching and dogma, that declared its independence from the kind of faith that is no more than the blind acceptance of absurdity. A science—an elemental, basic science that would in due course allow mankind to exploit the almost limitless treasures of the underworld—had at last broken free from the age-old constraints of doctrine and canonical instruction.
From now on—armed with a new knowledge and understanding of how matters were arranged below the earth’s surface—human beings could begin to explore their planet from a different perspective, and with an intellectual freedom that would in time permit them to look for and then to find astonishing things. The reverberations of that late-evening meeting can be felt distinctly down all the years. Each time a new oilfield is opened, or new gold is added to a reserve, or when more platinum or cerium or iron or manganese is won from the earth’s crust, it is perhaps appropriate to remember these three men. To remember them, and to savor the irony that, while Townsend and Richardson worked that night under the leadership of William Smith, whose agnosticism was well known, they themselves were churchmen—making this particular bid for intellectual freedom an act of brave defiance, and one of which their bishops would doubtless disapprove. Yet though the Church may have briefly frowned, all humankind went on to benefit.
The trio finished the document at midnight, and made three fair copies. They called it the “Order of the STRATA and their embedded ORGANIC REMAINS, in the vicinity of BATH; examined and proved prior to 1799.” Wrote a Bath city historian of the time, “Each person took one copy” and was encouraged to make further copies as necessary. There was, the historian added, “no stipulation as to the use which should be made of it, and accordingly it was extensively distributed, and remained for a long period the type and authority for the descriptions and order of superposition of the strata near Bath.”
We are not sure exactly who received copies, except in one or two cases: Benjamin Richardson, for example, acting to fulfill Smith’s wishes that the discovery be made universally known, gave “without reserve, a card of the English strata to Baron Rosencrantz, Dr. Muller of Christiania,* and many others, in the year 1801.” Smith was pleasantly surprised a couple of years later when a geologist named William Reynolds turned up in Bath from Coalbrookdale in the West Midlands, and told Smith that copies of his table of strata, of which he had one, were circulating among the educated classes in both the East and West Indies!
William Smith had made his observations, had formulated his theory, had tested his ideas, had been proved correct, and was now publishing his notions for the world to read. He was a
lready socially established; now he was on the verge of what no Oxfordshire country boy could ever have imagined: adulation—and fame.
Yet at almost the same moment as he verged on triumph, so William Smith was sowing the wind, of which he would eventually reap the whirlwind. He had, it will be remembered, bought for himself an attractive small estate, the Tucking Mill House, at Midford. He had a mortgage, for the not-insubstantial sum of £1,300, and he was under contract to pay an annual sum to the owner, a Mr. Conolly.†At the time he made the purchase he was fully employed by the Somerset Coal Canal Company and had both a generous salary and guaranteed expenses.
But on Wednesday, June 5, 1799, William Smith was abruptly and unceremoniously fired. It has never been entirely clear why. One suggestion has it that he disagreed violently with the way the canal was being built, and in particular over the decision to construct a mechanical lifting device instead of a flight of locks to bypass a hill near the village of Combe Hay. A more popular explanation is that the directors found an unacceptable conflict of interest in his purchase of Tucking Mill—which lay beside the canal—at the very time he was engaged in buying land for the canal’s passage. It seems that he approached Conolly with a view to buying land for the canal right of way and asked him if he might throw in a few extra acres for himself at the same time—if true, a somewhat imprudent act that might reasonably be expected to at least raise some canal company eyebrows.
Whatever the reason, the company asked him to leave, quickly, and with little fuss or ceremony and no suggestion of a pension or golden handshake. A job that had brought him almost £450 a year was brought to a sudden end. The firing, even though Smith does not appear to have contested it, unsettled him gravely, and his letters of the time show him to have become briefly angry and embittered. But by the end of the year he seems to have settled somewhat, and by the time he had his famous dinner at Great Pulteney Street, he was his old self, brimming with self-confidence and ambition.