Simon Winchester also wrote The Surgeon of Crowthorne about a homicidal maniac who made a significant contribution to the Oxford English Dictionary while detained in a mental hospital.
This book is about William Smith, son of a blacksmith, who created the world's first geographical map and virtually invented single-handed the science of stratification, being the first man to realise that fossils could be used to date sedimentary rocks. It is also a tale of a snobbish Georgian upper-class closing ranks against this ill-bred man and consigning him to bankruptcy, debtor's jail, and ignominy before recognising his genius. It's a great story, well-written, which hardly ever flags (though I perhaps didn't want to know quite so much about Oolitic Limestone).
Smith was born in 1769, the year that Josiah Wedgwood opened the 'Etruria' pottery near Hanley, the year that James Watt patented the first condensing steam engine, and the year that Richard Arkwright made the first water-powered spinning frame. It was also the time when agriculture was improving in productivity by leaps and bounds, following the Enclosure Acts, resulting in boom in population which made it clear that Britain couldn't feed its people.
The book is filled with wonderful pen portraits of remarkable characters, albeit cameo roles in Smith's drama:
- The Duke of Bridgewater, who started the canal craze by building one from his coalfields to Manchester to ship his coal: "He was at first widely disliked. As a young man he was irredeemably philistine, with little regard for art or society. He dressed intolerably badly. He loathed flowers and all kinds of ornamentation. He smoked like industrial Manchester, consumed pounds of snuff, never wrote letters, had arguments with everyone. ... He was a curmudgeonly bachelor and a misogynist who so despised women that he would even allow one to serve him at table." (Ch 4)
- John Farey, who started as the steward of the Duke of Bedford at Woburn, "became an expert musician (and a chorister of note), a mathematician whose work (on the curious proerties of vulgar fractions) is still known today, and a contributor to encyclopaedias on such topics as astronomy, engineering, the history of pacifism, the design of steam-engines, the decimalization of currencies and the population theories of Thomas Malthus." (Ch 12)
- "William Wollaston was ... said by all to be a man blessed with the most acute powers of observation. He could apparently see the tiniest of flowers while riding on horseback. He invented the camera lucida after noticing something odd in the crack in his shaving mirror. He was one of the few men who ever noticed a mirage on the River Thames. He was doctor, an expert on kidney stones and on mineral-based enlargements of the prostate." (Ch 17)
And there is a roll-call of other interesting people who were associated with Smith, from the Duke of Bedford to Selina Hastings, from Adam Sedgwick to Roderick Murchison. from Sir Joseph Banks to Louis Agassiz who invented the concept of the ice age.
Selected quotes:
- "It has long been said that the people of England could never be poor, since they lived on an island made of coal, and surrounded by fish." (Ch 4)
- "Adelard, 'England's first scientist', a twelfth -century philosopher who had written treatises on the abacus and the astrolabe, had been born in Bath." (Ch 9)
September 2022; 299 pages
Other books on the History of Science and Biographies of Scientists can be found here.
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