Reading the Rocks

by Brenda Maddox

  3

  DOWN THE MINES

  ‘Our civilisation . . . is founded on coal,’ George Orwell wrote in 1937 in The Road to Wigan Pier. ‘The machines that keep us alive, and the machines that make machines, are all directly or indirectly dependent upon coal. In the metabolism of the Western world the coal-miner is second in importance only to the man who ploughs the soil.’ He then advised: ‘When you go down a coal-mine it is important to try and get to the coal face where the “fillers” are at work . . . when the machines are roaring and the air is black with coal dust, and when you can actually see what the miners have to do. At those times, the place is like hell . . .’1

  The rise of the new science of geology was driven by the urgent need to get coal out of the ground. Coal was a northern European fuel. Although the first-century Romans who lived in Britain had found it useful, they did not attempt mining; they simply dug up what they found lying near the surface.

  Britain came late to the recognition of the importance of rock study, having lagged behind France, Germany, Hungary and Russia, where the art of mining had been taught in scientific institutions for decades (the St Petersburg School of Mines was founded as early as 1773). However, as the demand from its factories and steam engines grew, and mining technologies improved, Britain was able to quickly overtake its neighbours. By the 1830s Britain was producing more than half of the world’s coal.

  Deep-shaft mining began in Britain in the late eighteenth century and expanded rapidly. Industry developed techniques for excavating at greater and greater depths as well as a knowledge of where coal seams lay. Almost as important was to show where coal could not be found in order to save companies from drilling needless deep boreholes. Britain became pre-eminent in geological theory through Lyell’s Principles of Geology, in which Lyell deplored Britain’s slow start: ‘Our miners have been left to themselves, almost without the assistance of scientific works in the English language, and without any “school of mines”, to blunder their own way into a certain degree of practical skill.’ This ‘want of a system’, he charged, was all the more deplorable in a country ‘where so much capital is expended and often wasted, in mining adventures’.2

  Many of the growing ranks of geologists in the 1820s were indifferent to theories of the earth’s origin in fire or water. What mattered more were the great financial rewards waiting for those who could read the rocks and tell others where to dig. One important innovator was the geologist and Anglican parson William Conybeare. Conybeare’s principal work, Outlines of the Geology of England and Wales, published in 1822 showed the location of the Carboniferous, coal-containing beds. Such precise information was of immense value to industry and intensified British interest in geology.

  British coal proved so abundant that it was able to keep up with rising demand. During 1770–80 annual production output was about 6.25 million long (as opposed to metric) tons. Output soared after 1790 and reached 16 million tons by 1815, at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, by 1881, British production had reached 184,300 tons per annum, with nearly half a million people employed in mining.

  It is hard now to appreciate that the famed industrial revolution was based entirely on an industry which sent men to work knowing that each day could be their last. By 1800 Britain’s coal mines had men and boys working as deep as 1,000 feet below the surface. Wooden pit props were introduced to support the roofs in deep shafts, allowing easier access to even richer seams. Miners carried oil lamps or candles to light the darkness, risking the constant danger of igniting flammable gases.

  Controlling the circulation of air and dangerous gases was vital. As early as 1815 the Sunderland Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coalmines appealed to the most esteemed scientist in the land, Sir Humphry Davy, to find some safe way to illuminate the mines. His swift invention of the Davy Lamp made his already famous name even more famous. Protection for miners came with a lamp that achieved safety by restricting the entry of air to the wick lamp through a mesh screen. Yet the death rate did not drop dramatically: miners could be careless in its use, finding it a good way to light their tobacco pipes. That problem remained unsolved until the late 1880s when electric lighting was installed underground.

  Still the underground tunnels carried the menace of flooding, collapse and explosions. At the all-too-frequent miners’ funerals, male voice choirs, accompanied by colliery bands, sang moving songs such as ‘Gresford’. The ballad was written soon after the Gresford Colliery disaster in northeast Wales in 1934, when around 250 miners were killed after an explosion of firedamp. Ventilation shafts collapsed and men and boys were entombed when the mine was sealed off to prevent further explosions. Despite desperate efforts to get the bodies out, only eleven were ever recovered. The reportorial song is still sung:

  You’ve heard of the Gresford disaster,

  The terrible price that was paid,

  Two hundred and forty-two colliers were lost

  And three men of a rescue brigade.

  It occurred in the month of September,

  At three in the morning, that pit

  Was racked by a violent explosion

  In the Dennis where gas lay so thick.

  The gas in the Dennis deep section

  Was packed there like snow in a drift,

  And many a man had to leave the coalface

  Before he had worked out his shift.

  [. . .]

  Down there in the dark they are lying,

  They died for nine shillings a day.

  They have worked out their shift and now they must lie

  In the darkness until Judgement Day.

  The Lord Mayor of London’s collecting,

  To help both our children and wives,

  The owners have sent some white lilies

  To pay for the poor colliers’ lives.

  Farewell, our dear wives and our children,

  Farewell, our old comrades as well.

  Don’t send your sons down the dark dreary pit,

  They’ll be damned like the sinners in hell.

  Other Victorian mining disasters included the Haswell explosion in Durham in 1844, which killed ninety-five colliers, and that at the Hartley Colliery in Durham in 1862, which took the lives of 204 men and boys.

  The danger has persisted. Britain’s mining archive lists more than 200,000 men, women and children as having suffered death or injury in the pursuit of coal up to the end of the twentieth century. In that century alone more than 100,000 coal miners were killed in the United States.

  Yet a bigger fear in the second part of the nineteenth century was that the coal would run out. In 1865 a young economist, W. S. Jevons, wrote The Coal Question in which he warned that Britain’s ‘lavish use of cheap coal’ could not continue. The coal might soon be exhausted and prosperity would disappear with it: ‘We have to make the momentous choice between brief greatness and longer continued mediocrity.’3 In fact, coal output rose and the price fell for many decades.

  Even now, according to the science historian Matt Ridley, fossil fuel is not running out. He has called Jevons’s gloomy warning ‘hilariously timed, six years after the first oil wells were drilled in Pennsylvania’.4

  4

  VESTIGES OF PATERNITY

  Geology had many fathers. Although no one ever claimed the title, a man to whom it was publicly accorded was the mapmaker William ‘Strata’ Smith.

  The publication of Smith’s ‘Geological Map of England’ in 1815 marked the beginning of geographical exploration in Britain. Working alone, and travelling much of the time on foot, Smith combed England, Wales and southern Scotland, examining the rocks and classifying the strata according to the fossils found in them. He discovered the same strata occurring in different patterns across the country. (He compared them to a pile of slices of bread and butter.1) Analysing these slices created the new art of stratigraphy.

  Writing in the journal British Critic in 1831, Charles Lyell claimed that English success in the study of strat
igraphy ‘must make it hereafter appear one of the most remarkable passages in the history of science’. These early researches would lead to an understanding that stratigraphical classifications and configurations could be applied throughout the world.

  In 1831, the Reverend Adam Sedgwick, president of the Geological Society of London, awarded Smith the society’s first Wollaston Medal, saying it was fitting ‘to place our first honours on the brow of the Father of English Geology’.2 Smith was ‘a great original discoverer in English Geology’, he declared, ‘and being the first, in this country, to discover and to teach the identification of strata, and to determine their succession, by means of their embedded fossils’.3 The Wollaston Medal, made of gold and valued at ten guineas, was intended to form part of the annual award left by the bequest of William Wollaston, a chemist. Unfortunately for Smith, the new medal had not yet arrived from the Royal Mint. He had to be content with a purse containing twenty guineas and await the medal’s later arrival. Even so, he made what the society felt was ‘a short and manly speech’.4 The Wollaston Medal remains geology’s equivalent of a Nobel prize.

  Sedgwick’s accolade transformed Smith, a humble surveyor and orphaned son of a village blacksmith, from provincial folk hero into a major icon of British science. Smith had offered the first formulation of the law of strata identified by fossils – that is, the understanding that the proper sequence of rock strata can be ascertained by observing the fossils characteristic of each layer. In other words, two layers of rock from different sites could be regarded as of equal age if they contained the same fossils. Smith also opened the way to the understanding that the composition of the earth’s crust was more economically useful and intellectually exciting than were theories of the forces by which that crust had been moulded.

  Smith’s brightly coloured map, published on 1 August 1815 and titled ‘The Strata of England and Wales with part of Scotland’, measured five feet by three feet and was printed across fifteen individual sheets. Showing the location of coal, chalk and low marshy ground or fens, the map was nothing less than a history of Britain told through the layers of its rocks. His great innovation was to trace rock formations or strata across country – hence his nickname ‘Strata Smith’. One of his map’s revelations was to show how the distinctive chalk of England’s south coast (including the famed White Cliffs of Dover) forms an almost continuous outcrop reaching to the Midlands and northeast Yorkshire. (It was later understood that the deposition of the chalk occurred in what became known as the ‘Cretaceous period’, beginning about 140 million years ago.)

  Smith’s knowledge of Britain’s geography came from the assignment he received from his employers, the Somerset Canal Company, who aimed to build a grand canal to serve the county’s coal-mining industry. Smith was set the task of travelling the length and breadth of England and Wales to research how waterways were being constructed and linked together. For his tour, Smith travelled by coach, sitting up alongside the driver and a guard armed with a blunderbuss to fend off the highwaymen who were a constant menace.

  In 1792 Smith climbed down into every one of the mines in the Somerset coalfield and saw what is today called ‘the Westphalian stage of the Upper Carboniferous’ – rocks laid down about 310 and 290 million years ago. It was in the Mearns Colliery that Smith first noticed the succession of rock and fossil types that indicated their comparative ages. ‘The stratification of the stones struck me as something very uncommon,’ he wrote in a letter (‘stratification’ was a seventeenth-century word that would come into geological use in 1795 to refer to the order of the layers of sedimentary rock) ‘and until I learned the technical terms of the strata,’ Smith continued, ‘and made a subterranean journey or two, I could not conceive a clear idea of what seemed so familiar to the colliers.’5

  He then grasped that recognisable seams of coal would always be in the same relation to one another. His imagination went further. He saw it possible ‘to map the underneath of England’ – that is, to find and identify the outcrop of a particular stratum in one place, then find it in other maps and be able to ‘extrapolate the position of that stratum as it snaked through the entire English underworld’.6

  Smith also helped in plotting the routes of the canals themselves – the highways of the future. Plans were conceived for connecting the whole country – linking the Thames to the Mersey, for example – to carry not only coal but other products such as Wedgwood porcelains and barrels of ale. The alternative form of transport was primitive: horse-drawn wagons to haul coal from its sources to the factories and railways that depended on it, as by then did many homes for heating.

  Smith’s work is celebrated in the 2001 biography by Simon Winchester, The Map That Changed the World, which contends that Smith produced the first true geological map of any place in the world, one that in itself opened the way for making fortunes in oil, iron, coal, gold and diamonds.7 (Winchester, while confessing that he would not want to dislodge his hero, Smith, from his pedestal as father of English geology, acknowledges that an earlier naturalist named John Rawthmell had noticed in the 1730s that the curious figured stones, not then recognised as fossils, occurred inside the rocks that stretched northeast from Dorset to Yorkshire.8)

  That one of the strongest candidates for geology’s founding father should be British, owed much to the country’s unique collection of rocks, representing almost every geological epoch, from the pre-Cambrian to the most recent. To have this history displayed over a relatively small space made travel and exploration comparatively easy. The convenience of geography can ‘tempt the belief’, wrote Winchester, ‘that it is right and proper that the science of geology was born in Britain, and further adds emotional claim to William Smith being its most natural father’.9

  The importance of Smith’s map was recognised by the prime minister himself. Lord Liverpool, the Conservative leader, came to see it at Smith’s modest London home off the Strand and personally congratulated him on a wonderful creation. Four hundred copies of the map were printed, numbered and signed, sold with the simple title: ‘W. Smith’s Discoveries of Regularities in the Strata’.

  For Smith, such recognition may have helped to weaken his belief that geology was an upper-class occupation or, as he put it, ‘the theory of geology was in the possession of one class of men, the practice in another’.10 Certainly Lyell in his Principles, written fifteen years later, drew attention to Smith’s humble background, describing him as ‘an individual unassisted by the advantages of wealth or station in society’, and calling his map ‘a lasting monument of original talent and extraordinary perseverance, for he explored the whole country on foot without the guidance of previous observers, or the aid of fellow-labourers, and had succeeded into throwing into natural divisions the whole complicated series of British rocks’.11 J. F. D’Aubuisson, whom Lyell described as ‘a distinguished pupil of Werner’, paid a just tribute to this remarkable performance, observing that ‘what many celebrated mineralogists had only accomplished for a small part of Germany in the course of half a century, had been effected by a single individual for the whole of England’.12

  Aside from Werner, a strong Continental candidate for geology’s father is Georges Cuvier. Cuvier is now acknowledged as the scientist who brought zoology to bear on geology. He is unquestionably the father of vertebrate palaeontology – the study of fossil bones and the prehistoric life forms on earth. Cuvier maintained that anatomy must follow fundamental laws just as Newton’s laws of physics do. If the fossil came from a carnivore, then it would display evidence of grasping forelimbs, sharp teeth, or strong hind limbs for catching and eating meat. From a single fossil bone (as Balzac had noticed), he could tell whether the beast was a mammal, a reptile or a bird.

  With lively clear eyes, red hair and a strong mouth, Cuvier was an attractive man who had made a vivid impression during his visits to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. He travelled to Oxford in 1818 in order to see William Buckland and the university’s new museum display of
recently uncovered dinosaur bones with huge teeth still attached to the jaw.

  More than anyone, Cuvier was responsible for the remarkable change in geology that occurred by the end of the 1820s. His Ossemens fossiles rallied the first generation of English palaeontologists. As a great comparative anatomist who studied amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, he showed that the importance of fossils lay not just in their survival but in the clues they revealed as to how the parts had fitted together. The book’s full title (Recherches sur les ossemens fossiles de quadrupèdes, où l’on rétablit les caractères de plusiers espèces d’animaux que les révolutions du globe paroissent avoir détruites) shows that Cuvier was as concerned with the disappearance of species as with their formation. He invited readers to follow him into the past and try to decipher and restore earth’s history ‘before any nations existed’.

  Cuvier saw the poetry in geology. He envisioned that the new science might ‘burst the limits of time’ (‘franchir les limites du temps’) just as astronomy had burst the limits of space.13 Cuvier’s phrase accompanied a call to man to enjoy ‘la gloire’ of reconstructing the history of thousands of centuries which preceded human existence.

  Cuvier’s major contribution was to pose the question raised by the ancient fossil bones. What had happened to make the species vanish? His own explanation was that great catastrophes had enveloped the planet and wiped out a number of species. That was the best theory he could offer four decades before the appearance of the idea of origin by evolution. But he had at least opened the debate about extinction of species. Until then the prevailing belief had been that the creatures identified by fossils must exist alive elsewhere in some undiscovered part of the world. The very idea of extinction challenged religious teaching. Why, as Hutton had wondered about land, had God created living creatures only to destroy them?