Simon Winchester is the New York Times bestselling author of The Professor and the Madman. This New York Times bestseller is a tale of endurance and achievement, of one man’s dedication in the face of personal crisis and how his work helped create the world that we know today. Simon Winchester, author of The Professor and the Madman, tells the fascinating story of Smith’s remarkable scientific achievement, fall from grace and ultimate recognition as the father of modern geology.
But in a cruel twist of fate, his work was plagiarized and he was soon in debtors’ prison. In 1815, Smith published his groundbreaking geological map. Determined to create a map that would display this hidden underside of England, he spent 20 years traveling the country and studying rock outcrops and fossils. Someone expects to make.In 1793, British canal digger William Smith noticed that the rocks he was excavating were arranged in layers, and that the fossils found in one layer were very different from those found in another. And the work is being released in ordinary- and large-print versions as well as on audio tapes. The dust jacket unfolds to reveal a color replica of Smith's map. His book is being widely advertised and promoted by a nine-city author tour in the United States. Indeed, their recent success has launched a bandwagon, and Winchester is jumping onto it. It is gratifying that books on the history of science can become best sellers. Greenough used Smith's geological map of England and Wales (1815) in the Society's map of 1820-the year after Smith was imprisoned for debt. Simon Winchester says Torrens "gave generously of his time, his advice and help, and handed me an immense number of his own most useful papers, both published and unpublished, from which I learned much." The Map That Changed the World, then, is represented as an "hors d'oeuvre while we wait in eager anticipation for main dish, soon to come." But it would have been more seemly if Winchester had waited longer before publishing, given that one of his themes is Smith's treatment by George Greenough, the first president of the Geological Society of London. William Smith (1769-1839), dubbed "the father of English geology" by Adam Sedgwick, has long lacked a definitive biography, although the historian of geology Hugh Torrens is currently preparing one. Viking, London, and HarperCollins, New York, 2001. The Map That Changed the World William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology by Simon Winchester
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