400 ANNUAL REPORT SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION, 1951 



Mary Watson was burned to death in Philadelphia last week, while 

 attempting to fill a fluid lamp when it was burning, and the liquid 

 taking fire caused the catastrophe. Her mother and brother, who 

 were in the room, were also badly burned in attemf)ting to save her." 

 The same periodical reported on April 27, 1850, "A serious fire took 

 place at a camphene distillery in our city on last Friday, by which 

 several of the hands were severely burned. There is scarcely a week 

 passes over our heads without a number of accidents from the use of 

 camphene." The next year this state of affairs was still continuing. 

 "Two daughters of Alderman Ramass of New Orleans were burned 

 to death by the explosion of a camphene lamp ; two others were also 

 shockingly burned by the accident" (Gleason's Drawing Room Com- 

 panion, July 7, 1851). On September 17, 1853, the Scientific Ameri- 

 can again commented with some astonishing statistics : "According to 

 a record kept by Mrs. F. Merriam, there were, during the year ending 

 September 1st, 1853, some thirty-three fatal explosions, mostly in 

 the cities of New York, Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, and vicinity, in 

 which nineteen persons were killed, twenty-three persons fatally or 

 severely injured, three persons slightly wounded, and some three or 

 four buildings fired. The preparations alluded to are burning fluid, 

 camphene, spirit gas, rosin oil, etc." 



Probably the first effort to obviate these dangers was to design a 

 new burner less dangerous to use than the common whale-oil burner. 

 This was made so that its wick tubes extended upward, away from 

 the fuel, instead of downward. Thus less heat was conducted into 

 the reservoir from the flame, and the flame itself was a greater dis- 

 tance from the fluid. Extinguisher caps obviated the dangerous 

 necessity of blowing out the light. This burner was widely adopted, 

 as its frequent survival in collections and antique shops indicates. It 

 was designed to fit the same lamps that had burned whale oil, so 

 that the difference between a whale-oil lamp and a so-called "cam- 

 phene" lamp is often distinguishable only by its burner. An undated 

 advertising card of Marsh & Company's Patent Oil Manufactory of 

 Boston, probably printed in the 1840's, announces "New tubes fitted 

 to Common Whale Oil Lamps, from 6^4 to 12i^ Cents." 



It may be concluded that the fluid burner was only a relative im- 

 provement in safety, for most of the recorded accidents occurred after 

 the burner was in common use. The next moves were therefore to- 

 ward designing a "safety" lamp that would not explode. This hoped- 

 for goal was probably never achieved, but the efforts to do so were 

 numerous. Perhaps the most satisfactory was the one patented by 

 John Newell, in 1853, consisting of a cylinder of fine wire-gauze screen, 

 which encased the wick iuside the reservoir. Evidently inspired by 

 the Davy miner's safety lamp, this was supposed to keep the flame 



