I'm Deborah Daley and I work at the British Geological Survey and I am a Cartographer
My role over the years has changed tremendously
from traditional methods to more geospatial information systems.
The Geological Survey was founded in 1835 by the government
and its purpose was to map the geology of Great Britain.
The geologists were employed and they went out into the field to map the areas
and the areas that they mapped was done in summer
and then they came back into the office in the winter months
and they clean copied what they had worked on from their field slips onto a clean copy
and this took quite a lot of their time up so then in 1901 it was decided that
the survey would employ draftsmenor - cartographers as they are known today.
That was the first time cartographers was introduced to the Geological Survey of Great Britain.
This is the William Smith map behind me, it was produced by William Smith in 1815.
It's the first geological map of England, Wales and the lower parts of Scotland.
It's quite innovative in its time, it was made for the agricultural and coal mining industry.
to help them locate minerals and resources.
It was made into 15 components. This is a reproduction of those 15 components
that we've digitally enhanced and stitched together and as you can see
it's very pleasing on the eye and it relates to quite a lot of the geology as it is today.
The line work was hand engraved using special hand engraved tools
onto copper plates and it was coloured with 23 colours
to represent the strata and the base of the strata
was darker coloured and then it shaded towards the young inside
so it gives it a really nice effect.
So in these cabinets here we've got quite a lot of the artifacts from the early 1900s
where the geologists used to go into the field and map and clean draw the maps himself
and this is one of the standard issue field wallets he'd be given to take into the field.
In here we've got an example of a field slip so on the back is the location
six figure field reference and here we can see where he's penciled and done some very fine lettering.
In here he would put all of his notes, this is a field notebook and this is a really old one
and you can see tiny little bits of references to all the notes. Each note would be numbered
and all of these numbers would usually be put on the back of the field slip to denote what
site it was so you get a six-figure reference number to the site locations
and any little bits of information that he could take from the location he would put
onto these notebooks and they were just a wealth of information
for when he got back into the office.
In the early days when I started then it was called the Institute of Geological Sciences
and we used to produce the maps that were made for printing the published series maps
onto a scribe coat which we have here so if you can see
the image from the field slips or the clean copied manuscript copies
were photographed onto this coating which took a photographic image
and then we were able to with sapphire tools and the ruling sapphire tools
we used to be able to look down and scribe
along the lines very very carefully any mistakes that we made had to be rectified
we had to resurface this film and all the lines depending on what we were showing
had to have an ink black ink peg because in effect we were making a negative
for the printing plates. We would have the topographic base and then
any lettering would then be placed down registering everything
with locating pins for the printing drums
and all the lettering had to be hand placed by hand.
This was photographed onto film, these are all to a specific specification
for British Geological Survey and each one was
cut out and lifted up very carefully this was very very thin film and
it took quite a lot of patience to flick them up and place them on.
So here we have a borehole symbol and then we would place it on the map
and we would get our burnisher and rub it gently onto the map where it was to be shown.
Because the film had wax coating you had to burnish it carefully
so as not to stretch the symbol but just enough to apply an even pressure
and get rid of as much wax as possible because
the photographic techniques were able to burn away the wax surface
around the symbol so you have to be careful when burnishing.
All the lettering was hand applied and we used to have a type setting
machine which we used to type the text onto.
It was then put onto a film such as this and each one was clipped out
and applied onto the map. So here you see the generalized vertical section
with all the names of the formations and
all the information needed for the map.