Bill Bryson - The Stone Breakers

 As far as I know this chapter of Bill Bryson is telling us about the history of geology. It is also telling us about the people themselves whom discovered new theories and ideas on their dispute.

The first person to discover geology was a man by the name of James Hutton. In his time with no rivalry, he found a question he needed an answer to, it was "how slow the shaping of the earth is". Unfortunately, he himself was not able to set it in a written form that people could understand. In his 1795 masterwork, he created the science of geology almost singlehandedly, changed our perspective on the shaping of the earth.

When James Hutton passed away, a man called Charles Lyell was born.  He became a professor of geology at Kings College in London from 1831 to 1833. Also at this time he produced 'the principles of geology,' which elaborated on the thoughts first voiced by James Hutton.
Between James Hutton's time and Lyells, there was another important idea people pondered about and in the end there became two sides, catastrophists and uniformiterains. Catastrophists thought that the earth was shaped by catastrophic events such as flooding and earthquakes. While the others thought it all happened over massive spans of time.
In the end, not one person in this generation could figure out an equation for how many years the earth had existed.