Thomas Sopwith (1803-1879) was a prominent mining engineer, living and working around the coalfields of Newcastle. An early enthusiasm for pursuits involving drawing and measuring led to his taking up land-surveying and engineering, and his publishing his Treatise on Isometric Drawing in 1834. He would later work with William Smith, the founder of stratigraphical geology and in 1838 encouraged the government to set up the Mining Record Office. The present Geological Models represent the stratification of the Newcastle coalfield and were much admired, winning Sopwith the Telford medal of the Institute of Civil Engineers in 1842. They were produced in three sizes and presented to colleagues and museums, with an accompanying Description of a series of Geological Models illustrating the nature of stratification, valleys of denudation, succession of coal seams in the Newcastle coal field, the effects produced by faults or dislocations of the strata, intersection of mineral veins, &c.
William Buckland (1784-1856), dean of Westminster, twice president of the Geological Society, professor of Mineralogy at Oxford, and winner of the Wollaston medal in 1848, was a geologist and a philosopher. Amongst his most popular and well-regarded works were Reliquiæ Diluvianæ, or Observations on the Organic Remains attesting the Action of a Universal Deluge (1823) and his 1836 "Bridgewater treatise", a compendium of geological and palaeontological science up to that time, taking as one of its aims to illustrate "the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God as manifested in the Creation". Buckland and Sopwith would have known each other as fellows of the Geological Society and through a shared interest coal fields - in 1825 Buckland had published an essay entitled "A description of the South-Western coal field of England".