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Updated: May 27, 2025
At the close of the last century, as workings began to be carried deeper, and coal was obtained from places more and more infested with fire-damp, it soon came to be realised that the old methods of illumination would have to be replaced by others of a safer nature.
Fire-damp may be sometimes heard issuing from fiery seams with a peculiar hissing sound. If the volume be great, the gas forms what is called a blower, and this often happens in the neighbourhood of a fault. When coal is brought down in any large volume, the blowers which commence may be exhausted in a few moments.
As they walked on, Simon Ford told the engineer all that he had done to attain his object; how he was sure that the escape of fire-damp took place at the very end of the farthest gallery in its western part, because he had provoked small and partial explosions, or rather little flames, enough to show the nature of the gas, which escaped in a small jet, but with a continuous flow.
He experimented upon the fire-damp at the blowers in the mine, and also by means of the apparatus which was blown up in his cottage, as above described by himself.
"They say some may have escaped, and things may have been worse above than they were down at the bottom. Perhaps they threw themselves flat on their faces, and let the blast pass over them. I heard father say, only the other day, that was the best thing to do when fire-damp breaks out. He wouldn't have forgotten that, mother, would he?"
Some had been blown to pieces by the fire-damp; others had been stifled by the choke-damp; a still greater number had been killed coming up and down the shaft, either by the rope or chain breaking, or by falling out of the skip or basket, or by the skip itself being rotten and coming to pieces.
"And no Sir Humphry Davy safety lamps," said Denny in sadness. "They wouldn't be any good," said Oswald; "they're only to protect the hard-working mining men against fire-damp and choke-damp. And there's none of those kinds here." "No," said Denny, "the damp here is only just the common kind."
An example has already been given of the way in which people have been saved from the effects of inundations in mines, others have been dug out when buried by the fall of roofs, but almost countless are the numbers who have perished from other causes, for if the first have destroyed their hundreds, the fire-damp in coal mines has proved the destruction of thousands.
In our day multitudes of people fall victims to all kinds of dreadful disasters, explosions of boilers, explosions of fire-damp, of everything that can explode, for the agents of destruction seem to be in a state of unnatural excitement as well as human beings. Never before, perhaps, have inanimate things seemed so much in accordance with the spirit of the times.
Explosions which are always more or less attributable to the effects of coal-dust are generally considered, in the official statistics, to have been caused by fire-damp. The Act regulating mines in Great Britain is scarcely up to date in this respect.
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