Felling Mine Disaster - Safety Lamps

Safety Lamps

The disaster stimulated a then unknown engineer, George Stephenson, to design a safety lamp, known as the Geordie lamp, with air fed through narrow tubes, down which a flame could not move. It also led Humphry Davy to devise another safety lamp, the Davy lamp, in which the flame was surrounded by iron gauze. The gauze had to have small spaces so that a flame could not pass through, but could admit methane, which then burned harmlessly inside the lamp. The height of the luminous cone above the flame gave a measure of the methane concentration in the atmosphere.

The lamps did not prevent further disasters because there were other sources of ignition, such as sparks from metal tools such as picks and shovels and later, electrical equipment and explosives used to blast tunnels. Both lamps could set off explosions if the gauze of the Davy lamp rusted through (likely in the wet environment of a pit bottom), or the glass on the Geordie lamp fractured. Later devices such as the Mueseler lamp were better protected, but all such lamps gave poor illumination. It was one cause of nystagmus, a disorder of the eyes common among coal miners. It was not until electric safe lamps were introduced at the end of the Victorian period that miners had adequate and safe lights.