Sir Warington Wilkinson Smyth was born on August 26, 1817, in Naples, Italy, where his father, William Henry Smyth (1788-1865), was engaged in the Admiralty Survey of the Mediterranean.

He was a British geologist. He was educated at Westminster and Bedford School. He graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge (B.A., 1839). After receiving a travelling scholarship, he spent about four years in Europe, Anatolia, Syria, and Egypt, studying mineralogy and mining, examining coal fields, metalliferous mines, and salt-works, and meeting many distinguished geologists and mineralogists. Upon his return to England in 1844, Smyth was appointed mining geologist of the National Geological Survey. In 1851, he became a lecturer at the Royal School of Mines, a post he held until 1881. In 1851, he became Chief Mineral Inspector of the Office of Woods and Forests. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1858. He became president of the Geological Society of London in 1866–1868. In 1879, he was chairman of a Royal Commission on Accidents in Coal Mines, thus becoming part of the reform for safety in mines. In the same year, he became the Foreign Secretary of Geological Society. He contributed papers to the Memoirs of the Geological Survey, the Quarterly Journal of the Geological Society, and the Transactions of the Royal Geological Society of Cornwall, serving as its president from 1871 to 1879, and again from 1883 to 1890. He was the author of “A Year with the Turks” (1854) and “A Treatise on Coal and Coal-mining” (1867). Smyth was knighted in 1887.

In 1864, he married Anna Maria Antonia Story Maskelyne (1827–1909). He died on June 19, 1890, in London, England.