The Map that Changed the World: the tale of William Smith and the birth of a science Simon Winchester Viking, 338pp, £12.99 ISBN 0670884073

It is not until you think, really think, about how maps generally show only the surface of the earth that the full achievement of William Smith becomes clear. His big idea was to work in three dimensions, charting the rocky underworld that lay deep beneath England's smooth fields, sudden ridges and dull, blank wastes. The result, which took years of tramping, sampling, drawing and shading, was the world's first proper geological map.

Smith was working during the early decades of the industrial revolution, when the implications of this new kind of knowledge were huge. Now was the time when the most unlikely landowners, Byron included, were desperate to know if there was a chance they could become coal millionaires. Others, such as Thomas Coke of Norfolk, wanted an analysis of their soil so that they could seed and stock it along the new "scientific" lines. And then there were all those businessmen, speculators and engineers who needed to be sure that the canals they were busy cutting through Britain's crust represented the shortest viable route from A to B. To all these people anxious for answers, Smith was the man with the key to the new age.

Given the financial value of Smith's work, it was inevitable that he would soon attract covetous glances and, in time, copycats. The self-taught son of a yeoman, he felt none of the casual ease and sense of entitlement that marked most of the rich vicars, scientific squires and forward-looking dons who made up the early geological establishment. His Oxfordshire vowels and awkward appearance meant he wasn't asked to join the pivotal Geological Society of London, despite having more knowledge of the subject than the rest of the members put together. In the end, it was one particularly unpleasant grand young man, George Bellas Greenough (a Surrey MP), who pirated Smith's map and blatantly used it as the basis for his own, inferior version.

Smith didn't help himself by developing a taste for fancy living that he could ill afford (especially given that Greenough's map was selling for almost a pound less than his). He liked collecting houses almost as much as fossils, and ended up with a heavily mortgaged property empire, which included a mill house in Somerset and a five-storey riverside mansion in London. Having a completely mad (and thus expensive) wife hardly helped. By 1819, Smith was doing time in a debtors' prison (the King's Bench, in fact, where Dickens's Mr Micawber later went). It was only as a 60-year-old, when the anxious snobberies of the earlier period had broken down, that Smith finally received recognition as the man who had changed the face of the earth.

The commercial success of Dava Sobel's Longitude in 1998 has had the unfortunate effect of imposing a shape on so many subsequent popular historical narratives, with their obligatory silly subtitles. According to this template, a decent, working-class boffin beavers away for years in the 18th-century equivalent of a garden shed, while a bunch of toffs in wigs do everything they can to make sure that he doesn't get the credit for his brilliant breakthrough. Simon Winchester is unlucky in that the story of William Smith superficially resembles that of John Harrison, Sobel's hero who struggled to throw a net around the world. Fortunately, Winchester is such a fine historian, journalist and stylist that he manages to make this whole genre (popular science history refracted through partial biography) seem absolutely new.

Particularly impressive is the way Winchester recreates the world picture of a society tottering on the edge of an epistemological abyss. The discoveries of Smith and men like him (it is always a problem with this type of narrative that the assistants, best friends and also-rans are edited from the picture) led to more than a few squires scrabbling hopefully for coal in the top field. As deeper and older strata came to light, it became increasingly clear to thoughtful people that the world could not possibly have been created in the way the Bible said. There must, surely, have been more than six days of labour involved in creating the fabulously varied landscape that Smith measured and plotted as he trundled around the country with his plane table. In these first stirrings of doubt about the literal truth of Genesis lay the beginnings of the crisis of faith that threw such a deep, dark shadow over Victoria's reign.

Winchester has written a wonderful book. That his chosen genre is oversubscribed should not detract from what is a remarkable achievement. This is a model of what popular history can be.

Kathryn Hughes is a biographer and critic

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