The Safety Lamp That Was Not Safe

By the 1840s the miner's safety lamp was already a celebrated piece of British invention. The book is not impressed by it.

It first sets out the scale of the problem: upwards of twenty thousand people lost their lives in the coal mines of Great Britain in little more than twenty years, killed by explosions of inflammable gas and by the carbonic acid gas the miners called choke damp.

Then it turns to Sir Humphry Davy's lamp and says, plainly, that "it does not appear to deserve that name, as many very serious accidents have happened in collieries where it has been in constant use."^[1]