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

Too much hero worship and too many tangential digressions

The geologist William Smith is hardly a household name, but then again, how many geologists are? Perhaps Smith is more renowned in his native England, but Americans who aren’t specialists in this field are unlikely to have heard of Smith before coming upon Simon Winchester’s 2001 biography, The Map That Changed the World. Smith’s claim to scientific fame is that he discovered that rocks are arranged in strata, formed in different geological eras, and each strata can be identified by the fossils it contains. This was a very controversial idea at the time, when most people, scientists included, believed that God created the Earth a few thousands, not a few billion, years ago. Smith, also a skilled surveyor, was able, over the course of almost two decades, to single-handedly map the distribution of geological strata over the entirety of England, Scotland, and Wales. Because of good old-fashioned British classism, Smith was unfairly denied the credit he deserved for his discoveries. After reading Winchester’s book, one might also say he hasn’t gotten the biography he deserves either.

The most bothersome aspect of Winchester’s book is his unrelenting hero worship of Smith. There’s no attempt made for even the semblance of objectivity. First of all, “Changed the World” is a bit of an overstatement, isn’t it? Winchester makes it sound like prior to Smith’s map, everyone believed that the Earth was 6,000 years old. Later in the book, he does let it slip that maybe a few other scientists had the same idea. In a book that’s largely about fossils, Winchester doesn’t even mention Georges Cuvier, the Frenchman often credited as the “founding father of paleontology.” Winchester asserts that Darwin would never have formulated his theory of evolution were it not for the earlier pioneering work of Smith. That may be true, but the same could be said for at least a hundred other scientists. That’s what scientists do. They build upon the foundation of knowledge established by those before them. Smith did the same thing, even though Winchester tries to convince you that he was a savant who conducted research and experienced scientific revelations in a vacuum.

I don’t mean to make less of Smith’s discoveries and accomplishments; I only mean to make less of Winchester’s writing about them. Winchester repeatedly uses the words “genius” and “triumph” far too often throughout the book. Just tell us what the guy did, and let the reader be the judge of whether he’s a genius or not. The fact is, Smith only seems to appear sporadically in the book, while Winchester goes off on way too many extended asides: the history of prehistoric life, the history of coal, the history of canal building, the history of Bath as a tourist destination, Winchester’s own travels in the region, etc. Smith, meanwhile, feels like a forgotten guest in his own biography. Winchester also enjoys rattling off the names of myriad English towns and villages as if the reader grew up in this neighborhood and is expected to be intimately familiar with the area. Instead of a New York Times Bestselling scientific biography, the result often reads like a book aimed at a regional audience about a hometown boy who made good.

I read a lot of science biographies such as this. Of those written for a popular audience, the best ones grab your attention with an exciting story of the adventure of discovery. In that regard, The Map That Changed the World is a little on the boring side, mostly due to Winchester’s numerous digressions. Did I learn a thing or two about geology? Yes. Did I learn as much about Smith as I expected? No, not really. If there’s a more academic biography of Smith out there, it might be worth reading, but Winchester’s book wouldn’t inspire me to want to seek one out.

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