The Map That Changed the World Read Online Free Page A

complications of too much thought. They were taken on faith as the revelations of Scripture, and when and if they were recounted, they were larded with appropriate and long-remembered quotations from the Book of Genesis.
    The infant Smith, whose father and mother were an essentially unremarkable country couple * was thus born into a world of which at least the basis of existence had a certainty. The origins of the planet, just like the origins of mankind, were assumed to be fixed, uncomplicated and divinely directed.
    But all such assumptions were to be assaulted, and shockingly so, before the next hundred years were out. To no small degree it was to be William Smith’s geological findings, along with a raft of other discoveries, that were to change things. His findings were to prove vitally important in triggering the collision that was eventually to take place between the religious beliefs that were in the ascendant at the time and the scientific reasoning that would provide the spur for the intellectual activities of a century later.
    Science was the key—along with the scientific method, with all its underpinnings of observation, deduction, and rational thought. The consequence, once the theories of Charles Darwin in particular had begun to sink in, was a profound modification of the way in which people thought of nature, of society, and of themselves. Which makes it all the more appropriate, given the impact his ideas would have, that it was into a time of suddenly accelerating scientific achievement and technological application that William Smith was born.
    For, at the very moment that he was born, things were changing, and changing fast. In the year of his birth—which according to parish records at Churchill was 1769—there were, for example, three developments, nicely coincident, that in retrospect suggest all too powerfully that change was in the wind. As indeed it was: For the first time in British history the word industry was no longer being used simply to describe the nobility of human labor and had come instead to mean what it does today: the systematic and organized use of that labor, generally with the assistance of mechanical devices and machines, to create what would thenceforth be called manufactured goods . The Industrial Revolution, in short, was at hand, and three creations from Smith’s birth year are well worth noting, since they more than anything suggest the temper of the times. As it happened, for instance, 1769 was the year of grant of patent for James Watt’s first condensing steam engine—perhaps the most important invention of the entire era. Josiah Wedgwood, who had been busily making fine pottery in Staffordshire for some years past, opened his great factory, known as Etruria, near Hanley, also in 1769. And the great field of textile making, which was being steadily revolutionized by a cannonade of new inventions, was most notably advanced by the creations of Richard Arkwright—who made the first water-powered cotton-spinning frame, also in 1769. * Watt, Wedgwood, and Arkwright—a holy trinity from the brave new world that was coming into being—were now unknowingly ushering in the man who would change the view of that world for all time.
    In all corners of the industrial world there was change, development, innovation, the shock of the new. Coal, iron, ships, pottery, cloth, steam—these were the mantras of the moment. The great English ironmasters, for example, were approaching their zenith: Cranage, Smeaton, and Cort were developing the processes for “puddling” iron and rolling molten metal.Abraham Darby and John Wilkinson were constructing the first iron bridges in the world. Wilkinson, unarguably the greatest of all eighteenth-century champions of things ferrous, was making the first mine railway in 1767, then the first iron chapel (for a congregation of Wesleyans), and was using iron lighters to shift coal to his three furnaces (and, to cap it all, had himself buried in