In 1969, Winchester joined The Guardian, first as regional correspondent based in Newcastle upon Tyne, but was later assigned to be the Northern Ireland Correspondent. As an author, Simon Winchester has written or contributed to over a dozen nonfiction books and authored one novel, and his articles appear in several travel publications including Condé Nast Traveler, Smithsonian Magazine, and National Geographic. Through his career at The Guardian, Winchester covered numerous significant events including Bloody Sunday and the Watergate Scandal. Simon Winchester, OBE, is a British writer, journalist and broadcaster who resides in the United States. He lived as a homeless man for ten long years.Įventually a kindly aristocrat discovered him Smith, the quiet genius and 'father of geology' was brought back to London and showered with the honors that he rightly deserved. But four years later, swindled out of his profits, Smith ended up in debtors' prison. In 1815 he published a hand-painted map more than eight feet tall and six feet wide. Obsessed with creating a map that would showcase his discovery, Smith spent the next twenty years traveling England alone, studying rock outcroppings and gathering information. And out of that realization came an epiphany: that by following these fossils one could trace layers of rocks as they dipped, rose and fell - clear across England and clear across the world. While surveying the route for a canal near Bath, he noticed that the fossils found in one layer of the rocks he was excavating were very different from those found in another. From the author of the bestselling The Professor and the Madman comes the fascinating story of the father of modern geologyIn 1793, William Smith, the orphan son of a village blacksmith, made a startling discovery that was to turn the science of geology on its head.

The map that changed the world