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The 1900s and Onward
Published in Sidney Dekker, Foundations of Safety Science, 2019
After the Felling Pit Disaster, the local parish priest, Reverend Hodgson, produced a pamphlet containing an account of the accident (Coal Mining History Resource Centre, 1999). This pamphlet was republished in the Proceedings of the Royal Philosophical Society, which in turn led a London barrister to publish a proposal for setting up a “Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines.” This group came to be known as the Sunderland Society. It included among its members George Stephenson (later famous for The Rocket locomotive) and William Clanny, an inventor. The Sunderland Society aimed to establish prizes for the invention of safer schemes for ventilating and lighting mines. Their meetings and correspondence focused on demonstrations of mine safety technology—in particular, the society became a forum for debate about who should be credited with the invention of the safety lamp. The society’s efforts contributed to the widespread use of three different lamp designs: the Davy Lamp (invented by Sir Humphrey Davy), Clanny’s lamp, and Stephenson’s “Geordie Lamp.”
Sources and Resources for Davy: 1960 and Now
Published in Ambix, 2019
On the safety lamp the little-known and self-taught George Stephenson by trial and error had invented the “Geordie” lamp just as Davy was investigating the properties of “fire damp” and the conditions under which it exploded. Stephenson thought the gas was hydrogen; Davy established that it was methane, and went on to invent a lamp in which the incoming and outgoing gases passed though small holes to dissipate heat; and subsequently replaced the holes and glass with wire gauze, which turned out much safer. He did not seek a patent (trade again), and proclaimed his philanthropy; while building on Banks’s perception that this discovery cast the Royal Society and metropolitan science in a new light – the idea that applied science at last really worked, and that the days of ignorant provincial trial and error that had brought us the steam engine and the spinning jenny were over, and that the trained expert in his laboratory was now the source of new technology.