PRACTICAL AND APPLIED CONTEXT OF SMITH'S CONTRIBUTIONS

We are children of our time, influenced by contemporary events and recent history.

Smith was no exception being born in 1769, within a decade of the start of the English Industrial Revolution, which saw the transition to new manufacturing processes from about 1760 to sometime between 1820 and 1840. Smith died in 1839.

In 1700, the population of Birmingham now England’s largest second city, was 15,032. Birmingham is close to Coalbrookdale, the seat of the English Industrial Revolution, where iron ore was first smelted in 1709 using locally mined coking coal. By 1778 the population of Birmingham had grown to 42,250 and by 1841 to 182,922.

What effect did external influences such as the French Revolution (1789), the resultant Napoleonic wars (1799 to 1815) and the Scottish enlightenment with the rise of empiricism and inductive reasoning (broadly the Eighteenth Century) have on Smith? The late 18^th and early 19^thcenturies were times of social ferment in England. The movement of population from the country to town encouraged the exchange of ideas through corresponding societies, the organisation of labour and self-improvement, political agitation and pressure for Parliamentary reform.

Smith had many and varied careers: as a land surveyor, canal surveyor, land drainer and irrigator, mineral prospector, sea-defence builder and harbour builder, and finally as a land steward. We might view Smith as a man for hire, and his work, in whatever role, as a consequence of the need to ‘fuel’ the Industrial Revolution by transporting raw materials, finished goods and manufactures, and through agricultural improvements to help feed a burgeoning and increasingly urban population. As examples, I will talk about the Bath Easton coal mine and early speculative searches for coal, as well as drainage schemes relating to ‘agricultural improvements’.

In common with many at that time, Smith received little formal education and was largely self-taught, an artisan, trained as a surveyor and an acute observer. Was he immune from the ideas of Hutton about the enormity of time? The little we know of Smith’s religious beliefs suggests he believed the rocks recorded acts of creation rather than deposition and as a third example of Smith’s work I will talk about organisation of fossils and relative chronology.