Writer Simon Winchester

DATE August 7, 2001 ACCOUNT NUMBER N/A
TIME 12:00 Noon-1:00 PM AUDIENCE N/A
NETWORK NPR
PROGRAM Fresh Air

Interview: Simon Winchester discusses his latest book, "The Map
That Changed the World," and the creation of modern geology by
engineer William Smith
NEAL CONAN, host:

This is FRESH AIR. Terry Gross is on vacation. I'm Neal Conan.

A little more than 200 years ago, an engineer named William Smith emerged from
a coal mine in England with a great idea. In his trips up and down the shaft,
he realized that rocks were arranged in layers. And as he studied them, Smith
realized that he could tell the layers apart by looking very carefully at
their fossils. Specific fossils, it turned out, were unique to specific
layers. Follow the fossils, in other words, and you can follow the rock.
William Smith had just invented geology.

Working almost entirely on his own, he proceeded to create a great map of the
world beneath his feet. Smith's new science not only pointed the way to vast
treasures of iron, coal and oil, it also laid the groundwork for an
intellectual revolution. For his troubles, William Smith saw his work stolen
and was forced into debtor's prison. Simon Winchester tells the extraordinary
story of Smith's discoveries, tribulations and eventual vindication in a new
book called "The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of
Modern Geology." I asked him to describe a dinner party in 1799 where Smith
electrified two learned men, the Reverend Joseph Townsend and the Reverend
Benjamin Richardson, and first codified his theories.

Mr. SIMON WINCHESTER (Author): Of the three, two were divines, educated men
of the cloth, men of the church, and they were men who had collected, amassed
a large number of fossils. This was their hobby. They had elegant houses.
They had beautiful specially built glass cases where they kept ammonites and
trilobites and various other `ites' that they had dug and found in the earth
and the cliffs around the city of Bath. These men, despite being educated,
nonetheless believed that these fossils were beautiful and had nothing at all
to do with life. They weren't evidence as we know now of life ever having
existed in the rocks, in the seas that they knew nothing of around Bath, but
that they had been placed there by the Almighty.

Well, this to us today would be regarded as a primitive thought, was
challenged by the third guest at this dinner party, who was this uneducated
man, William Smith, who was at the time of the meeting--What?--about 30 years
old, and he had realized that fossils were not only probably the evidence of
life having existed when the rocks were laid down, but most particularly were
peculiar to certain levels of rocks. So that one particular fossil was in one
type of rock and another very different was in another layer of rock. And
that if you followed these fossils and these rocks throughout the countryside,
you could draw a table showing the order in which the rocks appeared, in which
they had been laid down, and theoretically follow the rocks across the country
and, therefore, draw up in your mind a picture of the hitherto unseen
underneath of the country.

And so at this dinner party in this elegant room in Bath in a house which
still exists, William Smith stood up and dictated the first ever order of
strata of England, 23 layers ranging from the limestone at the very top down
to a coal at the very bottom. And this was the beginning of the new science
called stratigraphy, which enabled eventually a map to be drawn of the whole
of England and Wales.

CONAN: Well, we can see why that's intellectually stimulating. We can see
why it certainly would be practical to look for coal or gold or anything else
underneath the surface. Why was it revolutionary?

Mr. WINCHESTER: It was revolutionary because up to that moment, mankind had
essentially no realization of what was underneath his feet. People in
Britain, in France, in stripling America at the time, whenever a mineral
appeared in a cliff, they would make use of it. If it was coal, they would
burn it. If it was iron, they would smelt it and so on. But they had no way
ever of knowing what was anywhere other than in the cliffs, in the outcrops,
in the embankments, the cuttings, in the various other ways in which rocks
were displayed at the surface. They had no way of knowing what was
underneath. And the revelation that Smith uncovered was that it was possible,
first of all, to extrapolate from what was seen at the surface and, therefore,
predict what was underneath the surface. And once you can predict what's
underneath the surface, then nations can suddenly begin to exploit the wealth
that laid beneath them, which up to that moment was completely invisible to
them.

So it was profoundly important not only intellectually, because the whole new
science of geology, which led ultimately to Charles Darwin's realizations
about fossils 70 years later and about the origins of species, but it also led
to the discovery of gigantic sources of wealth.

CONAN: Well, William Smith, your hero, was born into a world that held
certain views.

Mr. WINCHESTER: He most certainly was, and those views were that the Earth
had been created on the 4th of October, 4004 BC. There was specific data. I
think it was 9:00 on a Monday morning. This, of course--this absurdity,
nonetheless believed, I dare say, by many people still here today, but what I
think is generally regarded as an absurdity, was first rooted by this
extraordinary bishop of Armagh, Bishop Usher, who calculated with great
precision, or so he thought, by looking at all the generations that were
written about in the Bible, all those begettings and begottens that happened
in the various books of the Bible, and calculated all the way back to find out
that without a shadow of doubt, in his mind at least, the Earth was created on
this Monday morning, 4004 years before the birth of Christ. And in the second
day, light and dark and, you know, the Earth without form.

And this was the world into which William Smith was born in 1769, and very,
very few people challenged that belief. A dame called Nicholas Stenno(ph) did
posit the idea that perhaps the fossils that were found might have something
to do with life and that possibly the world was actually considerably older
than the man that inhabited it. But generally speaking, the people who
surrounded William Smith had no such belief, and he was brought up as a child
into that very extraordinary system.

CONAN: He did not set out to destroy the system, though, and why was it that
his discoveries were so key to unraveling Bishop Usher's ideas?

Mr. WINCHESTER: Mainly because he was able to demonstrate that it wasn't the
principal reasoning behind it, what he was discovering, but he was able to
demonstrate that fossils showed astonishingly small but, nonetheless,
continuing gradations in their advancement, if you like. You could take
something like an ammonite, which, as you may know, is a sort of spiral-shaped
marine creature that flourished in the Jurassic; not as romantic as many of the
dinosaurs that Mr. Spielberg likes to make films about, but nonetheless, a key
animal.

Well, William Smith, who studied the Jurassic, the rocks that lie in a great
swathe across England from Dorset in the south right up to Yorkshire in the
northeast--he studied the ammonites and was able to show that ammonites that
are very old have a very distinctive set of differences which can be in layers
of rocks immediately one above the other, can be shown to have tiny
gradations, eventually producing a very different ammonite; many, many
thousands of feet high or, consequently, many, many millions of years later.

And it was this realization that animals over the years changed into other
animals that made Darwin suddenly realize--because Darwin more than anything
was a geologist. Many people seem to forget that the man that went on the
voyage of the Beagle was, at call, a geologist, and he realized after looking
at Smith's maps and after reading the work of Charles Lyle(ph), who was the
man who learned such a lot from Smith and who went to write these four
magisterial books on geology at the beginning of the 19th century, that these
minute changes in creatures were evidence of some process happening, a process
that he later went on to call natural selection and which made him, bingo,
suddenly discover the origin of species.

And so you can take this journey, this very easy journey from James Hutton,
the first ever geologist really in Britain, via William Smith, to Charles
Lyle, Lyle to Darwin. That's why what Smith discovered, what this unsung man
who had such a difficult life, what he discovered had such a profound effect
on intellectual development in the 19th century.

CONAN: Smith himself was an engineer, a very practical man. He worked on
canals, a very important technological advance at that time. He worked in
coal mines, but surely, other people had noticed this stratification of rock
before.

Mr. WINCHESTER: Not really, oddly enough. I mean, there was a Frenchman,
Jean Louise Gergot de Sulaviea, who did, but he wrote only about the Paris
Basin. A man called Gromeat down there did the same. But very few people. I
mean, it seems--that's the extraordinary thing about his achievement. To us
today, you would drive down a freeway, you would go on a railway train, you go
down a canal, you can see the layers of rock, and to you and me, it's
perfectly obvious that the rocks at the top, if they're laid down
horizontally, are younger than the rocks at the bottom. That's sort of
axiomatic. But it wasn't axiomatic in 1799 when William Smith was dictating
this table to his colleagues in that house in Bath. It was completely unknown
because of the mind-set of the people of the time that didn't believe that
such a thing had happened. To them, all of the rocks had precipitated out of
the sea, out of the flood, at the same moment. The kind of thinking of these
people 200 years ago beggar's belief really, and that Smith brought some logic
to his approach to it is a mark of his genius.

CONAN: My guest is Simon Winchester. His latest book is "The Map That
Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology." We'll be
back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: My guest is Simon Winchester. His new book is "The Map That Changed
the World." Could you set William Smith in his social and historical context?
This is, after all, the England of the Napoleonic wars, the English gentry
that was being described by Jane Austen. But William Smith, of course, is on
the other side of that class divide.

Mr. WINCHESTER: Very much. He was this orphan son of a blacksmith in rural
Oxfordshire, far away from the metropolitan sophisticates. This was the time
of Beau Nash and Beau Brummell, where in the center of London, there was the
dandy and the female equivalent of the dandy, a word I'd never heard before
which apparently existed, the dandyzette(ph). And at the same time, and
perhaps crucially for Smith, it was the beginning of the Industrial
Revolution. The year that he was born was the year when Josiah Wedgwood began
making his china. It was the year when the great iron masters were developing
new techniques for making iron. James Watt, perhaps most crucially of all,
was inventing the steam engine. And suddenly there was a rush from the
countryside, where places like William Smith was born, into the great cities
of Birmingham and Manchester and London and Newcastle and Glasgow.

And there was a sudden need to smelt all the iron and to fire the furnaces and
the ovens to make the china and the steel, a need for some means to heat all
of that. And the obvious thing was coal. I mean, it's often said that
Britain could never be a poor country because it was an island built on coal
and surrounded by fish. Well, to win that coal, to get it out of the mines
and then to get it to the great industrial centers required some form of
transportation. And what was suddenly decided upon by this maniac duke, the
Duke of Bridgwater, who had a vast number of coal mines on his estates in the
north of England, that you could dig great trenches in the earth, fill them
with water, call them canals and use horses to pull barges full of coal along
them.

And it was that, this mania for building canals, that first precipitated
William Smith into this new industrial world and allowed him to make these
discoveries, because there was a coal field to the south of Bath, where he was
employed. Then owners of the coal fields needed to get their coal to London
and to Birmingham, so they decided to dig a big canal, the Somerset Coal Canal
it was called, and they hired the young William Smith to be the surveyor. And
it was when he was digging it he noticed suddenly--that he wrote, `The layers
of rock looking like slices of bread and butter.' He made this sudden
realization, perhaps as I mentioned earlier, the older ones were at the
bottom, the younger ones are at the top. And if he could decipher the message
within these rocks from the fossils that were concealed in them, he could
decipher something and make something rather remarkable out of it. And so it
was the canal and his work on it that led him ultimately to create the map.

CONAN: How does the geology underneath the ground characterize the land that
we can see above the ground? I mean, is this obvious in, for example, the
area around Bath where Smith did most of his great work?

Mr. WINCHESTER: More than you can imagine. I think it was J.B. Priestly
who said that the oolitic Jurassic limestones of the Cotswold seemed to have
captured the sunlight of the ages. The warmth that radiates from these rocks
is a wonderful demonstration of the rocks that lie immediately below. You've
only, however, got to drive 30 miles to the southwest of Bath and you find a
completely different type of rock full of caves, for instance. I mean,
Cheddar Gorge where cheddar cheese comes from is in the carboniferous
limestone. A limestone that is particularly porous would be useless as a
building stone. Go another five miles further south and you come into the
area where the coal measures of the carboniferous outcrop, and here, there are
winding entrance for the mines, there are the spoil heaps of the mines. And
suddenly, the country becomes ugly.

And all over Britain--and when you go down to Dartmoor where you see these
great granite tours and these rounded high hills with the Hound of the
Baskervilles pacing across the moorlands, everything depends on geology.
Geology is--if I say it underlies everything, I mean that both in its literal
and metaphorical sense. So no surprises really that Britain was one of the
cradles of geology.

CONAN: Smith's two great passions, which were rocks and fossils, also
attracted upper-class adherents, dilettantes really who didn't necessarily
understand what they were looking at, but who appreciated I guess the fossils
for their beauty, as you talked about earlier, and were also beginning to
study geology.

Mr. WINCHESTER: In this world of London, this sophisticated city of the
people playing the spinet and having soirees in elegant drawing rooms, fossils
and the rocks in which they were found suddenly became regarded as objects of
great beauty, much like butterflies had been many years before or other--you
know, baseball cards and Pokemon cards today, things of value, things to be
traded, things to be displayed.

And so a sort of corps d'elite of elegant people, dandies, of whom the most
notorious is, at least as far as I'm concerned, is a man called George Bellas
Greenough, who was a member of Parliament, an extraordinarily wealthy man
whose fortune had come from his grandfather making Greenough's Little Liver
Pills, which apparently had something to do with dealing with flatulence. He
collected fossils and was one of the founding members in 1807 of a new
society, a little dining club as it was called, called The Geological Society
of London, a society which still exists and which I'm a member of. But they
denied membership to Smith because they didn't want rude, grubby-fingered men,
field workers, like Smith, in lower classes, to infest their chambers.

CONAN: Snubbing and snobbery are one thing. Stealing the man's work is
another.

Mr. WINCHESTER: That is one of the extraordinary and horrible tragedies of
this whole tale. William Smith, once having made his discoveries, worked for
getting on for 20 years to create single-handedly an astonishingly beautiful
geological map, the title, the map that I say and argue changed the world.
It's a huge thing, eight and a half feet tall, six feet wide, all hand
painted, a thing of great beauty. And he sold it. I mean, that was the
purpose. He wanted to make copies of it. He got a printer called John
Kerrey(ph) to print it on proper plates, and he sold it for between 6 and 12
guineas a copy.

But almost immediately, these people, George Bellas Greenough, this villain of
the piece, and his colleagues at the Geological Society decided that they
would plagiarize it. And they produced just a couple of years later an almost
identical map, copied entirely from Smith's work and sold it for a pound a
copy less. This led to the financial ruin of Smith, and there were other
reasons, too. Smith wasn't very good with money, but basically, his map
ceased to sell, and this plagiarized copy began to sell famously and all over
the world, too. Some copies are found to this day in Russia and here in
America. In North Carolina, there's a copy. But this ruined Smith. It drove
him to bankruptcy when he went into debtor's prison.

At the same time, his wife went spectacularly mad, suffering, among other
things, from nymphomania, which is an extraordinary byproduct of her madness.
And Smith had to sell all of his property, much the rest of it was
confiscated, and he had to leave for the north of England and live for nearly
a decade as a homeless man purely and simply because of the plagiarism that
had been committed by these ghastly, ghastly dandies down in London.

CONAN: Humiliated by this experience, he fled London and, again, another
irony, just as another portion of his map was about to be published.

Mr. WINCHESTER: On the very day John Kerrey, the map maker, produced an
atlas--in addition to the map, he produced a series of county maps, bound
together; beautiful things. You can still buy reproductions of them in London
today. But the money that was forthcoming from those wasn't sufficient; nor
was really anything sufficient to ward off the appalling humiliation that
Smith felt. So he collected his sick wife. He collected his young nephew
who, oddly enough, was called John Phillips(ph), later went on to become
professor of geology at Oxford, and he took these three on the stagecoach with
him and finally got down in the middle of nowhere in Northallerton in North
Yorkshire, and for the next decade almost, he worked catch-as-catch-can,
getting work wherever he could, living homeless in little inns and
occasionally sleeping rough, until one magical moment.

And that came in the 1830s, the early 1830s, when he found himself working for
a nobleman called John Stone(ph) in East Yorkshire. And this chap said,
`Aren't you the William Smith who created this extraordinary map that in
England and in France and in Germany and in America, they're all talking about
and making their own national versions of?' And Smith said, `Yes, I am.' And
John Stone said, `Well, it's ludicrous that you're working here as just a land
steward digging ditches on my land and living rough. I'll write to someone.'
And so these letters, the most moving things that I found, from John Stone to
another man in London and then that other man to the geological establishment
of the day, and everyone realized that this William Smith had been done a
terrible injustice and he was brought back to London. And--well, I won't go
on to the rest of the story, but the story works out rather well in the end.

CONAN: Simon Winchester. His new book is "The Map That Changed the World."
We'll be back with more on the birth of modern geology in the second half of
our show. I'm Neal Conan. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music; credits)

CONAN: Coming up, we continue talking about the birth of modern geology with
writer Simon Winchester. It's a story of forgotten genius, stolen honor and a
great map kept hidden behind a velvet curtain. Also, book critic Maureen
Corrigan with a summer reading tip. And rock critic Ken Tucker reviews a new
CD from The Dell McCoury Band.

(Soundbite of music)

CONAN: This is FRESH AIR. Terry Gross is on vacation. I'm Neal Conan.

Let's get back to our conversation with Simon Winchester, whose new book is
"The Map That Changed the World." To learn more about William Smith and the
birth of modern geology, Winchester retraced many of his hero's travels across
Britain.

You retraced some of Smith's wanderings when he was traveling over the English
countryside and gathering information to make his map. What did you learn
about him in this process?

Mr. WINCHESTER: Well, I went all the way from the southern tip of Dorset
where, oddly enough, I had gone to school back in the late '40s and early
'50s, way up to Yorkshire. And I think what I discovered more than anything
about him was his extraordinary tenacity. I mean, it's a long, long way, and
to travel, as I did, in a Land Rover, my car ...(unintelligible) is a
perfectly nice thing to do. And to say at B&Bs, bed-and-breakfasts, it was a
nice adventure. For him, without any other source of income, he was in
stagecoaches, he was walking on foot, he was climbing up hills with his plain
tables(ph), surveying, not for the two months that I took to make the journey,
but for 20 years, essentially on his own. He preferred to sit out in the open
air on the stagecoach, where he could better survey the countryside, rather
than the comfort, and dubious comfort, of the inside of an unsprung
stagecoach. So he was cold, he was invariably hungry, he was tired. But he
just went on with this dogged determination and eventually produced the map.

So more than anything, although I admire his genius and his vision in making
this great intellectual jump that is the hallmark of genius, it was his
determination to see it through. And creating this beautiful thing in these
apartments in London in the years 1814 and 1815, and finally seeing it into
production was just the icing on the cake. And this is what my tutor back in
in Oxford said, `More than anything, he was a great field worker, a determined
strongman,' and the results of that are seen in the map.

CONAN: What kind of companion do you think William Smith would have been if
you ran into him for dinner, let's say, in one of those country inns that he
stayed at when he was wondering around the country?

Mr. WINCHESTER: I think a rather gruff sort of man, slightly frightening. He
was very large. He had a face in which his features were very much the
features of an Oxfordshire yeoman. He wasn't one of these graceful figures
with aquiline noses--or an aquiline nose, I shouldn't say noses--and a
powdered wig. He was a rough, tough kind of individual. Some people said
that they took him for a military man, others that they took him for a boxer.
And I think he had a broken nose as well, and he wore the clothes of very much
a non-conformist. A lot of people thought he somewhat challenged the tenants
of religion, say, which, of course, in an intellectual sense, he did.

So I think had I been sitting at the bar in sort of the Rose & Crown in Ilkley
and Yorkshire, and this man came in with mud on his boots and took his hat
off, I think would be a little bit weary of him, but then he would get to
talking. And apparently, according to those like John Phillips, his nephew
who lived with him, he became so passionate about the rocks and the landscape
and knowing the invisible underside of the country across which he was
tramping that he completely captivated his audience. And so I think at first
intimidating, but secondly, totally captivated by him.

CONAN: Now as you just intimated a moment ago, you are a student of geology.
You read geology at Oxford some years ago. Was William Smith's reputation
then as exalted as it was a hundred years earlier?

Mr. WINCHESTER: Oxford in those days was called a hard rock school. We
tended to do more on volcanoes and the field work, but I did tend to be...

CONAN: Meant something rather different then than it does in another context,
hard rock I mean.

Mr. WINCHESTER: Yes, indeed. Hard rock means metamorphic and volcanic rocks,
and we were very interested not in the sedimentary rocks that contained
fossils that interested Smith, but more in volcanoes and that kind of thing.
And, indeed, most of the field trips I did went to places like East Greenland.

But my tutor, a wonderful man called Harold Reading, was very much a soft rock
man, a fossil man, a great stratigrapher. And in the first year I was up at
Oxford, which was 1963, I think--incidentally I might remark that an aunt of
mine thought I had gone to Oxford not to read geology, but to read theology,
and left me 500 pounds in her will for so doing. But Harold Reading said to
me--I would think it was probably in that first autumn--September, October,
1963--his great hero was a man called William Smith, a great unsung geologist
whose science he, Harold Reading, was teaching me, but who the whole world
seemed to have forgotten. Well, I have to confess that over the--What?--37
intervening years, I rather forgot William Smith, but when I was trying to
cast around for a subject that was as interesting to me as the story of the
making of the Oxford English Dictionary had been for my last book, I
suddenly...

CONAN: Which you described in "The Professor and the Madman."

Mr. WINCHESTER: In "The Professor and the Madman." I remembered William
Smith. It just sort of popped out of the clear, blue sky, and I looked him up
in the Encyclopedia Britannica--not much of an entry, but it did say he had
been to prison and his wife had gone mad. And I thought, `Ah-ha, there's a
possibility that there's an interesting story.' So I rang the Department of
Geology at Oxford, crossing my fingers that Harold might still be around. He
was still there, 80 years old, still very hale and hearty, had just come back
from a field trip in western Pakistan. And I rang him and I said, `Do you
remember me?' And flatteringly, he said, `Yes, I do. You have not become a
geologist. I think you're a scribbler of some sort, are you not?' And I
said, `Yes, Harold.' And I said, `I'm thinking of writing a book about
William Smith,' and there was this wonderful silence and then he said, `I
would think it would be the greatest pleasure you could give me if you would
turn your attention to William Smith, because he was a great man and no one
knows about him.'

CONAN: Well, before you became a scribbler, you did work in geology for a
couple of years.

Mr. WINCHESTER: I--well, just one year. I was in Uganda on the Uganda-Congo
border looking for copper, but I was absolutely hopeless at it and didn't find
any copper. But all I did do there was begin corresponding with the then
James Morris, because I was very interested in mountains and I was doing my
geology in the Ruwenzori Mountains, which are Ptolemy's Mountains of the Moon.
And in the local library there was a copy of James Morris' book called
"Coronation Everest" describing his being the Times correspondent--the London
Times correspondent in the successful 1953 Mt. Everest expedition, the one
where Sherpa Tenzing and Edmund Hillary got to the summit. And I thought
reading this that this was the most wonderful possible career for me. It was
like, you know, Paul on the road to Damascus reading the book.

So I wrote to James and I said, `I am a 21-year-old geologist living in East
Africa. Can I be you, essentially?' And he wrote back this wonderful letter
saying that `If you really, really want to be a writer, then abandon geology
and come back to Britain and get a job on a local newspaper,' and so I did.
And James and I corresponded for years and years and years. I didn't know for
a long while that he had become Jan Morris, which he did in the mid-1970s.
We've remained the best of friends and, indeed, have written a book together.

So, yes, I did begin as a geologist, but thanks to James, later Jan, soon
abandoned it.

CONAN: We left William Smith on the cusp of vindication about to return to
London. Describe what happened to him on his triumphant return to the
capital.

Mr. WINCHESTER: Well, by this time, the Geological Society of London had
purged itself of nearly every one of those dandies who had done Smith down in
1815 and 1816 and into 1819. That chapter was long over. We're now talking
about 1830, 1831. And the men that ran the society--and they, generally
speaking, it has to be said, were men--were real scientists, people like
Cedric(ph) and Murchison. And oddly enough, Peter Mark Roget of Roget's
Thesaurus fame was a member of the Geological Society and one of the committee
who looked into the possibility of rewarding Smith for his incredible work in
creating this new map.

Well, a man called Wollaston, who actually wasn't a geologist but was very
wealthy and had some amateur interest, donated a sum of money to the
Geological Society to create a medal, the Wollaston Medal. And the first-ever
recipient of it in 1831, it was deemed by Cedric and Murchison and Peter Mark
Roget, should be William Smith. It's the equivalent, this medal, of the Nobel
Prize, really. Anyone that wins it is regarded as the greatest geologist of
that particular year. And all the great figures of geology over the century
and a half since it was created have won it. Well, William Smith, this unsung
man, brought down after years of homelessness and humiliation, won the very
first one. He was also given a pension, because he was incredibly hard
up--a pension by King William IV. He was brought over to Trinity College,
Dublin, given an honorary doctor of laws.

And almost the summit, from a personal point of view, of his achievement, he
was put on the committee that was to select the stone for the building of the
houses of Parliament, those famous buildings by the Thames that everyone knows
as an icon of modern London. Sadly, the stones that he was party to selecting
eroded and corroded very quickly, and Charles Dickens was one of the first to
say that his stone selection was awful. So in a funny sort of way, that
memorial wasn't his greatest and they were replaced. But they were replaced
by rocks from the Jurassic, which was Smith's particular favorite horizon.

So all in all, his life came to--and all these accolades came in his later
life, when he was nearly 70. He died an honored man, I think, after having a
middle period of his life of terrible privation. So in the end, everything
worked out.

CONAN: In addition to this great map, of course, he made his living as, I
guess, what we would call these days a civil engineer, and one of his
specialties was draining farmers' fields. And you paint a wonderful picture
at the ceremony at which he was given his gong, the Wollaston Medal, and yet,
all of the people in the area, the farmers came around and asked his advice on
how to get their fields dry.

Mr. WINCHESTER: It sounds so non-romantic really, and yet, this was a huge
problem in 18th century and early 19th century Britain. This was, after all,
the time of the Enclosure Acts, which had been passed, and farmland was now
becoming sectioned off. The hedges were being created. The scenery that
makes Britain such a uniquely lovely country, particularly in the summertime,
was essentially being sculpted. And part of that sculpting had to be to drain
the bogs and the marshes and turn it into proper, arable pasture and farmland.
And William Smith was a past master at doing this.

And so you're quite right. Here we have a man who, after being transported
into oblivion and then rejuvenated by the success and the recognition, still,
despite being an honorary doctorate and having a pension from the king and all
these other great things, down in the depths of the countryside he was known
as the man who had drained the fields. And so he continued until almost his
dying day to be asked advice on how to make that swamp go dry.

CONAN: And where is Smith's original map today?

Mr. WINCHESTER: Hanging in obscurity, although I hope for not much longer in
obscurity, behind a huge pair of blue velvet curtains halfway up the stairway
of Burlington House in London, opposite Fortnum & Mason's on Piccadilly, which
is the headquarters of the Geological Society of London. And most people who
go up the stairs have no idea. They just see these blue curtains and imagine
that there's some tapestry that would be faded by the sun or something too
vulgar to show. But once in a while you can go and ask one of the assistants
to part the curtains, and then you see this extraordinarily beautiful,
still-unfaded and evidently hand-colored map of England and Wales. That's
where the Ur map(ph), if you like, occurs and hangs. There are about 43
copies known to be in existence still around the world. They come on sale
infrequently. They go for something like $100,000 each, so they're much
prized and much treasured.

Oddly enough, a copy is published, but not by the--by a British institution,
but by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists based in Tulsa, in
Oklahoma. In Tulsa they remember William Smith probably more acutely and more
fondly than he's remembered in Britain, where he truly is a prophet without
honor in his own country. But here, where oil and sedimentology was so
important, Smith, to a degree, is revered, and certainly in Tulsa.

CONAN: Simon Winchester, thanks very much.

Mr. WINCHESTER: Thank you very much, indeed.

CONAN: Simon Winchester's new book is "The Map That Changed the World." The
dust cover of the book, by the way, folds out into a full-color copy of
William Smith's great map.

Coming up, critic Ken Tucker on bluegrass, Chet Atkins and the
`country-politan' sound. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

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Review: New album by the Del McCoury Band, "Del and the Boys"
NEAL CONAN, host:

The Del McCoury Band, a bluegrass ensemble, has a new CD called "Del and the
Boys." Rock critic Ken Tucker happened to be listening to it when he heard of
the death of country music guitarist and producer Chet Atkins, and the
coincidence provoked these thoughts.

(Soundbite of Chet Atkins guitar music)

KEN TUCKER:

That's Chet Atkins working in a typical manner, tastefully adroit. Atkins
died on June 30th. He was 77. He established his reputation as a versatile
session guitarist and then, in the '50s and '60s, as one of the rare country
musicians who could make hit singles from instrumentals. But behind the
scenes, Atkins was even more influential. As a producer and executive for RCA
Records, he ushered in a signature style, surrounding singers like Eddy
Arnold, Jim Reeves and Don Gibson with string sections and harmonizing backup
singers. The style was sometimes called the Nashville sound or
`country-politan' because Atkins wanted to steer his genre toward the middle
of the road. He aimed for a smooth sound that would appeal to an urban
audience who found country music's banjos, fiddles and the keening wail of the
steel guitar to be off-puttingly low-class.

In other words, Chet Atkins is one of the men who helped ruin modern country
music. His influence can be heard in bland, multimillion sellers today like
Faith Hill and groups like Lone Star. No way would Chet Atkins have been
interested in promoting a group like the Del McCoury Band.

(Soundbite of Del McCoury Band)

DEL McCOURY BAND: (Singing) The tables are empty. The dance floor's
deserted. You play the same love song. It's the 10th time you've heard it.
That's the beginning, just one of the clues. You've had your first lesson in
learning the blues. When you're at home alone, the blues will taunt you
constantly. When you're out in a crowd those blues will haunt your memory.

The nights when you don't sleep, the whole night you're cryin', but you can't
forget her. Soon you even stop tryin'. You walk that floor and wear out your
shoes. When you feel your heart break, you're learning the blues.

TUCKER: In a way, the Del McCoury Band is a throwback to the pre-Atkins era,
an old-fashioned bluegrass outfit emphasizing pinched nasal harmonies, fiddles
and mandolins in the manner of the bluegrass pioneer who gave McCoury his
first big job, Bill Monroe. In recent years McCoury and his boys have backed
the rocker Steve Earle and they're not cold purists. Listen to the way they
cleverly work the phrases of pop psychology into a new song about an old
subject. It's called "Recovering Pharisee."

(Soundbite of Del McCoury Band)

DEL McCOURY BAND: (Singing) I'm a Pharisee in recovery. In your eyes I can
see a big sinner in me. It's the way of my human heart to confess other
people's sins. Be looking to admit my part or the deeper problem within. But
thank God he won't let me be or remain in my hypocrisy. Yeah, sooner or later
I'll be on my knees, honest to God, a recovering Pharisee.

TUCKER: When Chet Atkins died, The New York Times included the often-told
tale that, when asked to define his Nashville sound, Atkins would jingle the
change in his pocket and say, `The Nashville sound is the sound of money.'
Now I'm not naive enough to think that Atkins is a bad guy just because he
wanted to turn a profit or that Del McCoury doesn't. But Atkins' glib,
arrogant answer is certainly one reason why country music has become so
predictable. He helped create a marketplace that likes its country as
uncountry as possible, the equivalent of easy-listening jazz radio stations
for whom Kenny G is a touchstone.

As a guitarist, Atkins was a great technician, but he's one reason the Del
McCoury Band has to settle for a small-label contract and never gets played on
commercial country radio stations. For McCoury and his boys, the Nashville
sound is something a little more melodious than the sound of coins clanking in
a well-lined pocket.

CONAN: Ken Tucker is critic at large for Entertainment Weekly. He reviewed
"Del and the Boys" by Del McCoury Band.

(Soundbite of Del McCoury Band)

DEL McCOURY BAND: (Singing) Oh, the bags are packed. My nerves are wrecked.
She got a one-way ticket, ain't comin' back. Oh, baby, baby, where you gonna
find a good man like me? Where you gonna find a good man like me?

CONAN: Coming up, Maureen Corrigan has a suggestion for a perfect summer
read. This is FRESH AIR.

(Soundbite of music)

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Review: Allen Kurzweil's latest book, "The Grand Complication"
NEAL CONAN, host:

Book critic Maureen Corrigan is ruminating on fictional lost objects and lost
reading opportunities. Here's her review of Aaron Kurzweil's new novel, "The
Grand Complication."

MAUREEN CORRIGAN:

It's August, time to admit defeat. All those big, luscious biographies, those
shimmering novels that way back in May I felt certain I would read this
summer? Well, it ain't gonna happen. Merciless August sun shines through my
windows onto the dusty piles of books stacked optimistically around my house.
There on my night stand is the second volume of Blanche Weisen Cook's
biography of Eleanor Roosevelt and Ann Wroe's highly praised biography of
Pontius Pilate. I managed to read about 20 pages into each of them. Next to
the computer there's the heap of paperback reprints of celebrated recent
novels I missed the first time around: Rosa Shand's "The Gravity of
Sunlight," Francine Prose's "Blue Angel," Paul Watkins' "The Promise of
Light," all pristinely untouched. A couple of classics are buried in there,
too: Graham Greene's "The End of the Affair" and Esther Forbes' children's
novel "Johnny Tremain." I didn't even get to crack open George Pelecanos'
latest, much-lauded Washington suspense story "Right as Rain." The problem is
the weather. Long daylight hours and heat just aren't conducive to tackling
books you respect, books you want to give your full attention to. So what's
the solution, you might wonder? Jackie Collins? Danielle Steele?

Hold on. Before we surrender all claims to taste and rigor, here's an
alternative, Allen Kurzweil's new novel, "The Grand Complication." It's the
perfect summer folly for people who want to look smart while reading light.
The novel's cover and pedigree make a good first impression, a blurb by none
other than Doris Lessing, a prominent reference to Kurzweil's debut 1992
novel, "A Case of Curiosities," which nabbed the cover of The New York Times
Book Review. But inside this latest book, a drowsy reader will be reassured
to find nothing more taxing than the literary jigsaw puzzle overlaid with some
high-gloss, intellectual varnish. And just like a jigsaw puzzle or Scrabble
or the other mildly brainy amusements with which some people while away their
leisure time, "The Grand Complication" is highly absorbing while you're
reading it and imminently forgettable the minute you stop.

The hero of this tale is Alexander Short, a reference librarian at the New
York Public Library. Short is a naive young guy who's initially distinguished
only by his compulsion to make lists. His wife, a French artist who
specializes in pop-up books, has made him a notebook which he religiously
wears, monk-like, dangling from his waist. One day a fussy little man
approaches Short's desk and asks, `Might I steal a moment of your time?' The
man's name, Henry James Jesson III, and he requests a book on secret
compartments, but he's really after much more. Jesson's a collector of
strange objects and he wants a researcher to aid him in hunting for a
magnificent 18th century watch called The Grand Complication, supposedly once
owned by Marie Antoinette.

Alfred Hitchcock famously called this kind of lost object a MacGuffin because
the search for it sets a story in motion, a story which then becomes so
complicated that, ideally, you forget to care whether the object is ever found
or not. That's how the watch MacGuffin works here. It draws Short into a
creepy, elaborate quest in which he discovers secret compartments not only in
things and places like the Gothic New York Public Library or Jesson's archaic
town house, but also in people, like Jesson, himself, who grows more sinister
as the tale proceeds.

But "The Grand Complication" isn't a story about character. Instead, it works
hard to amuse, through literary illusion, tricks of the eye, heavy-duty plot
engineering. Given its highly stylized New York City setting and its
puzzle-type mystery so dependent on word games, Kurzweil's novel is
reminiscent of Paul Auster's "City of Glass." There's also a trace of the
influence of Jorge Luis Borges in the novel's obsession with classification
and the inner workings of libraries. And like many libraries I've spent time
in, "The Grand Complication" is also pretty airless. It's one of those
casual, summertime-type books you don't regret reading or finishing, either.

CONAN: Maureen Corrigan teaches literature at Georgetown University.

(Credits)

CONAN: For Terry Gross, I'm Neal Conan.
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