William Smith

William Smith was born on 23 March 1769 in Churchill, Oxfordshire, and died on 28 August 1839 in Northampton. He began work in 1787 as an assistant to the surveyor Edward Webb, and from 1791 carried out estate valuations in Somerset before spending eight years inspecting coal mines and canal cuttings for the Somersetshire Coal Canal Company, work that let him observe rock strata directly and repeatedly. He recognized that each layer of rock could be identified by the particular fossils it contained, and that these layers appeared in a consistent, predictable order wherever they were found, an insight now called the principle of faunal succession and a foundation of stratigraphy. In 1815 he published A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with Part of Scotland, drawn at a scale of five miles to the inch, the first geological map to cover so large an area in such detail. In February 1831 the Geological Society of London awarded him its first Wollaston Medal, with its president, Adam Sedgwick, naming him the father of English geology in the presentation.