EXPLOSIONS IN COAL MINES. 213 



abandoned. Moreover, it may be hoped that if it were found that a 

 great national benefit, such as a true miner's lamp would be, involved 

 either a long delay before it could be offered to the collier, or serious 

 compensation for an unexpectedly valuable patent right, no very exor- 

 bitant claim would be raised to avoid the saving of a human life per day. 



The one simple principle on which a lamp, whether a safety-lamp 

 or any other, may be made to yield the full light due to the perfect 

 combustion of the carbon of its aliment, is one long known to the miner 

 as applied to ventilation. A single shaft will not ventilate a mine. 

 In the same way, if a lamp or a candle be surrounded by a glass shade 

 only open at the top, it will not burn properly. The taller the glass 

 chimney the redder and dimmer will be the flame, until it is actually 

 extinguished by the product of its own combustion. This is usually 

 avoided by a free admission of air below the chimney, which is not 

 practicable in a safety-lamp. But if for one shaft two be substituted, 

 or even if the single shaft be divided the miners call it " bratticed " 

 into two vertical sections, a little heat will produce an upward cur- 

 rent in the one, which will be fed by a descending current in the other. 

 The lamp is only the mine in miniature. 



Very brilliant results have already attended the introduction of a 

 lamp constructed in accordance with this simple law, in the illumination 

 of railway carriages. No mechanical man can doubt that a modifica- 

 tion of the lamp now used in the royal saloon carriages might put in 

 the hands of the miner a real life-preserver. It would be a lamp which, 

 while impenetrable to fire-damp, or rather impenetrable from within as 

 a source of explosion, would give him what he now wants light in the 

 darkness of the mine. 



We have seen that, out of the half million of colliers, to whose 

 perilous labors we owe the warmth and comfort of our homes, the 

 speed and regularity of our traveling both by land and by sea, and the 

 aliment of that mighty host of mechanical horses which now perform 

 the bulk of the sheer hard labor required above-ground in the United 

 Kingdom, a tax on human lives at the rate of at least ten lives per mil- 

 lion tons of coal is exacted with much regularity. From a fourth to 

 a half of these lives are sacrificed by preventable calamities. It is by 

 satisfying the mute instinctive demand of the miner for light, in his 

 painful and dangerous toil, that these casualties which are preventable 

 can alone be certainly prevented. Is it necessary to say more in order 

 to turn the attention of the collier and of the engineer, of the man of 

 capital and of the man of science, of the economist and of the phi- 

 lanthropist, to the urgent question of providing the miner with a safe, 

 convenient, and luminous lamp ? 



P. S. Since the above was in type, has appeared the announce- 

 ment of a Royal Commission of Inquiry into Mining Explosions, to 

 the attention of which the above remarks may be respectfully com- 

 mended. Fraser's Magazine. 



