Smith, William (1769–1839)

William Smith was an English surveyor, canal builder, and amateur geologist who became known as the “father of English geology.” His main achievement was the creation of the first geological map, using fossils as a tool for mapping rocks by their stratigraphical order.

Smith was born in Churchill, Oxfordshire, into a humble family, and he received a limited education, although his work as a land surveyor for Edward Webb gave him a deep knowledge of the rocks. While working in an estate's pit mine in Somerset, he noticed that the strata were arranged in a predictable pattern and that the various strata could always be found in the same relative positions. Moreover, he realized that fossils were arranged in order and regularly in strata, always in the same order from the bottom to the top of a section, each stratum being characterized by a particular type of fossils. These observations lead him to propose the principle of faunal succession, according to which strata could be traced and correlated by comparing the fossils that they contained. Smith was probably the first to suggest that strata and their fossils were displayed in a natural order of indefinitely wide extension.

While he was working as a surveyor for a canal-building company until 1799, and later unemployed or taking different civil engineering jobs, he tried to test whether the same succession of fossil groups from older to younger rocks could be found all over England and if the relationships between the strata and their characteristics were consistent throughout the country. As a result of his research, Smith produced the first large-scale geological map of the area around Bath, Somerset, showing the outcrops of the rocks and their boundaries, coloring each rock type with a different color.

In 1815, after traveling all over England, mapping and collecting samples for more than a decade, and in spite of financial problems in funding his research, he published his masterpiece, the first geological map of England and Wales. The map itself is 6 feet across by 9 feet high, representing tens of thousands of square miles, and it used John Cary's national topographic map as a base map. This geologic map helped Smith to demonstrate the validity of his principle of faunal succession. Additionally, in 1816 Smith published the “Geological Table of Organized Fossils,” which completed the first map. Whereas Smith's map was overlooked by some naturalists, George B. Greenough and collaborators plagiarized it and sold it at a lower price, pushing Smith to bankruptcy and to debtor's prison in 1819. Released from prison, he worked as a surveyor for different employers, and conceived a more ambitious idea: the preparation of 60 geologic maps of individual counties in much greater detail, from which he finally prepared 21.

It was not until 1831 that his work was finally recognized. He was awarded the first Wollaston medal, the highest honor of the Geological Society of London. Afterward, his scientific achievements were widely appreciated; he was offered an honorary Doctorate of Laws by Trinity College and received a lifetime pension, awarded by King William IV. William Smith died on August 28, 1839, in Northampton, and he is buried in St. Peter's Church.

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