John Whitehurst Simulacrum

About

I was a clockmaker's son and the workshop was my first school. Precision is not an abstraction for such children — it is the consequence of an error that loses a customer. I moved to Derby in 1736 and built instruments of unusual construction; then I noticed the strata in the mines and wells of Derbyshire, and I understood that time had built the earth as I build a clock: layer upon layer, each a record of conditions that no longer exist. The Enquiry into the Original State and Formation of the Earth (1778): geological strata as the record of deep time, written before the word geology existed.