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William Smith was born in the village of Churchill in Oxfordshire, on 23rd March 1769, and was the eldest son of a blacksmith, who died when William was quite young. Smith attended the village school, where he obtained only a rudimentary education, but he had an enquiring mind and took note of everything he observed in the countryside in which he lived, especially the geology. In 1787, at the age of eighteen years, Smith was taken into the family of Edward Webb, a surveyor of Stow-on-the-Wold, and became assistant to him. Webb was impressed by his young assistant and gave him a great deal of encouragement. Whilst employed by Webb, Smith travelled around the countryside and was constantly adding to his knowledge of geology. Four years later, in 1791, Webb transferred to Smith the survey of an estate at Stowey in Somersetshire, and thus, eventually, he came to live and work in the Bath area. ÊIt was at this period of time that projects for new canals were in progress and soon William Smith was to be involved in the construction of a canal near Bath, of which, today, few traces can be seen. This canal was the Somerset Coal Canal and it was to join up with the Somerset and Avon Canal at Limpley Stoke, near Bath, from the various collieries south-west of the city. In 1793 Smith was engaged by Rennie (who had already constructed many canals and was also engineer for the Kennet and Avon Canal) to execute surveys and a complete system of levelling for the proposed canal. Whilst engaged in carrying out this work between High Littleton (where he lived from 1792 to 1795) and Bath, Smith noted the regular succession of the rock strata. ÊHe went on a tour of England with two members of the Canal Company, Richard Perkins and Sambourne Palmer, to investigate work already being done on other canals, etc., and this enabled him to extend the observations he had made whilst surveying the lines of the Somerset Coal Canal. The subsequent excavation and levelling of this canal revealed the dip of the strata and yielded fossils with which he learned to identify the regular succession of the strata. In 1795 Smith moved from High Littleton to Cottage Crescent near the top of Bloomfield Road, Bath, in order to direct operations on the canal and, in 1798, he was living at Tucking Mill, Midford, near Bath, although Êhe also spent some time at the Swan Inn, Dunkerton, in 1798. Smith ceased to be employed by the Canal Company in 1799. He had spent almost six years in setting out and superintending the work on the Somerset Coal Canal. It was in 1799, whilst William Smith was living at Midford, that he coloured the geological features on a map of five miles around Bath that he no doubt obtained from "The New and Improved Bath Guide". This map can be said to be the oldest geological map in existence. Also at Midford, in 1801, he coloured in the geological features on a small map of England. This was the first sketch of William Smith`s great geological map that came out in 1815. In the same year (1801), a prospectus was issued by Smith dated "Midford, near Bath, 1st June 1801". But it was in 1799 that the observations Smith had made regarding the rock strata, and its associated fossils, while working on the coal canal resulted in the writing of the document known as the "table of the Strata near Bath" and it was for this that William Smith became known as one of the principal founders of the Science of Geology. In July 1928, at a ceremony attended by many eminent geologists and officials of Bath Corporation, a memorial tablet was unveiled on the house in Pulteney Street where Smith dictated "The Order of Strata".
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