Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
A Brief History of Time
The age of the Earth has been one of the most controversial
numbers in science since the 17th century.
Stephen Brush
Primrose Hill in Gateshead was a modest street of single-bay
Victorian brick houses, terraced in tiers down the steep hill of
Low Fell. If you stood in the middle of the road the view below
was of green fields and a large sky, despite the town's location
in the industrial heartland of northern England, but the houses
were sideways on to this view and austerely faced each other
across the road, their front doors guarded from the street by
three feet, the occasional hydrangea, and an iron railing. In
January 1900, in the wintry dawn of a new century, Arthur
Holmes was ten years old and living at number nineteen, the
only child of staunchly Methodist parents. His father was a cab-
inet maker and worked as an assistant in an ironmonger's shop.
Consequently they were of modest means.
Not far away was Gateshead Higher Grade School where
Mr John Bidgood, the school's visionary headmaster, teacher of
biology, and world expert on tropical orchids, made sure that
provisions for the teaching of science were not exceeded by any
other municipal school in the country. It was, for example, the
first of those schools to have science laboratories specifically
designed and fitted for that purpose. In 1901, the year that Queen
