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Nicholas Wood, a good judge, has said of the two inventions, “Priority has been claimed for each of them—I believe the inventions to be parallel. By different roads they both arrived at the same result. Stephenson’s is the superior lamp. Davy’s is safe—Stephenson’s is safer.” When the question of priority was under discussion at the studio of Mr.
It was immediately placed in the hands of the workmen, finished in the course of a few days, and experimentally tested in the Killingworth pit like the previous lamps, on the 30th November. At that time neither Stephenson nor Wood had heard of Sir Humphry Davy’s experiments nor of the lamp which that gentleman proposed to construct.
An accident occurred in the Oaks colliery Pit at Barnsley, on the 20th August, 1857, which strikingly exemplified the respective qualities of the lamps. A sudden outburst of gas took place from the floor of the mine, along a distance of fifty yards. Fortunately the men working in the pit at the time were all supplied with safety-lamps—the hewers with Stephenson’s, and the hurriers with Davy’s.
Shortly after, Sir H. Davy’s model lamp was received and exhibited to the coal-miners at Newcastle, on which occasion the observation was made by several gentlemen, “Why, it is the same as Stephenson’s!”
It was Sir Humphry Davy’s ‘Last Days of a Philosopher,’ and on the first leaf was written, ‘Frederick Lawrence.’ I closed the book, but kept it in my hand, and stood facing the door, with my back to the fire-place, calmly waiting her arrival; for I did not doubt she would come. And soon I heard her step in the hall.
Stephenson was himself of opinion that the modification of his own and Sir Humphry Davy’s lamp, combining the glass cylinder with the wire-gauze, was the most secure; at the same time it must be admitted that the Davy and the Geordy lamps alike failed to stand the severe tests to which they were submitted by Dr. Pereira, before the Committee on Accidents in Mines. Indeed, Dr.
Sir Humphry Davy’s subsequent modification of the tube-lamp, by which, while diminishing the diameter, he in the same ratio shortened the tubes without danger, and in the form of wire-gauze enveloped the safety-lamp by a multiplicity of tubes, was a beautiful application of the true theory which he had formed upon the subject.
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