One important use of a safety lamp is not only to provide light in a gassy mine with methane up near a tunnel roof, but also to detect heavier-than-air carbon dioxide - "black damp" down near the floor.
As a student of mining I spent some time in the summer of 1950 at two coal mines in south Derbyshire. On my last three days I was sent to join a team opening up a one-in-four decline which had been dug from surface in 1926 intended to dewater a flooded seam, but had been abandoned and its entrance bricked up because the inflow of water drowned the pumps they had intended using. On the first day, a Wednesday, we broke open the brick wall across the opening. It being a bright, sunny day, the sunshine went down the dip, and about 300 feet down one could see the water. The tunnel, about eight foot square, concrete lined, looked neat, clean and inviting. The foreman lit his safety lamp, hung it down below his knees, and started to walk in, still bathed in bright sunlight. Two steps down dip, his lamp went out -indicating potentially suffocating black damp. We rigged up a fan and some tubing to blow in air. It was mid-day Friday before we could walk down as far as the water.
-----Original Message-----
From: mining-history [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of margaret and michael shaw
Sent: 14 November 2018 19:04
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: safety lamps
It had never occurred to me that a safety lamp would be used anywhere other
than as necessary in a mine but reading Dickens' Nicholas Nickleby I found
a reference to a lady carrying a Davy lamp on a coach, how many other
such uses existed?
Mike Shaw
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