Here's a photo of one of the cool things that my Honors students and I got to see on our recent trip up to Buffalo, New York (for the northeastern section meeting of GSA ):
That's an original, signed edition of the William Smith geologic map, brought to the meeting
courtesy of the Buffalo Library. It is one of only two in the United States; the other is at the Library of Congress. The map found a home in Buffalo (of all places!) thanks to Chauncey Hamlin, the head of the Buffalo Museum of Science (then called the Buffalo Society of Natural Science) from 1920 to 1948. During his tenure, he assembled a collection of first editions of many seminal scientific works. First editions of Charles Lyell's
Principles of Geology and Herbert Hoover's* translation of Agricola's
De Re Metallica were also on display at the conference.
* Yes,
that Herbert Hoover, at least
according to Wikipedia.
Labels: geology, history, maps, meetings, nova
7 Comments:
It's not just Wikipedia that says so. Herbert Hoover was a mining engineer and geologist at Stanford before he took up politics.
General Colin Powell is another, more recent former geologist who rose to a high rank in the US government. Powell has a batchelor's degree in geology from the City College of New York.
It's not just Herbert who got his degree from the School of Earth Sciences - his wife, Lou Henry Hoover, also had a degree in the geosciences from Stanford.
I just suffered a fit of complete and utter jealousy, especially considering I've been trying to negotiate image rights to that thing with the British Geological Survey for...oh, a couple of months.
Fortunately, I get to spend the next two years up in Buffalo, so I can at least remedy the jealousy.
Fellow map-geeks! yay! Rumor has it that Union College (in Schenectady NY) has an 'original' as well. I got to _touch_ the "map that changed the world" when I was in England. At the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institution.
http://www.brlsi.org/wsmith.htm
My hearts all aflutter just thinking about it!
Very cool!
I grew up in Buffalo ... how long will the map be there? I should go back for a visit.
Hoover also worked in the Kalgoorlie Goldfields of Western Australia.
Hi! I believe we met at NEGSA, on Dr. Brett's field trip. :) And I think one of your honors students wanted me to take a photo of a stromatolite because she left her camera in the car... But I never got her email address! All my photos from that field trip are here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/linden_tea/tags/negsa2008/
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