William Smith 1769-1839 Acknowledgements This meeting is a part of a number of events that mark the Bicentennial of the first map published by William Smith. We gratefully acknowledge the support of ARUP for making this meeting possible. Sponsor: CONTENTS Inside Cover Sponsors Acknowledgement Event Programme Page 1 Speaker Abstracts Page 37 Poster Abstracts Page 47 Speaker Biographies Page 57 Burlington House Fire Safety Information Page 58 Ground Floor Plan of the Geological Society, Burlington House William Smith Meeting 2015 200 Years of Smith’s Map 23-24 April 2015 PROGRAMME SPEAKER ABSTRACTS William Smith Meeting 23 April 2015 DAY ONE 1 William Smith's (1769-1839) Searches for a Money-earning Career Hugh Torrens Keele University, Keele, Staffordshire, ST5 5BG, UK email:
[email protected] This lecture will concentrate on Smith's, highly complex, early 'career paths'. His first employment was as a land surveyor (1). Then in 1793 he became both, canal surveyor (2), and engineer, (3) to the Somerset Coal Canal (SCC). These had guaranteed him a regular, and known, income. But this suddenly changed, when he was successively dismissed, first as surveyor, then as engineer, in 1799. He now had to find some other means of supporting himself, and the geological revelations, which he knew were so important, that he had uncovered in Somerset. In the mid-1790s, he had done some land drainage and irrigation work (4), for the chairman of the SCC, and immediately after his dismissals, was able to generate an adequate living from such work around Bath, during a period of very high rainfall.