286 



NATURE 



[October 27, 192 1 



engineer and inventor of more than ordinary 

 ability, and a man who has left his mark on the 

 mining industry with which he had been connected 

 from boyhood. His work in connection with coal 

 washing, coal cutting, prevention of accidents in 

 mines by the adoption of systematic and orderly 

 methods of mining, mine rescue appliances, safety 

 lamps, and stone dust as a remedy for colliery 

 explosions, has had a far-reaching influence in the 

 development of mining in this country. 



Sir William Garforth invented " stone-dusting " 

 from having observed that in an explosion in his 

 colliery the explosion stopped whenever it met a 

 road in which there was loose shale dust. He 

 had maps drawn to illustrate this, and in lectures 

 and speeches constantly advocated the use of stone 

 dust to prevent colliery explosions. Finally, at 

 his colliery he erected a model mine composed of 

 old cylindrical boilers bolted end to end. Coal- 

 dust explosions were promoted in this gallery, 

 with and without the presence of stone dust. 

 These experiments were strikingly successful. 

 He paid part of the expenses himself; part was 

 very generously subscribed by other coal owners. 

 Eventually the matter was taken up by the Home 

 Office and referred to a Royal Commission which 

 was provided with a certain sum of money to 

 carry out experiments. This sum was supple- 

 mented by grants from the Coal Owners Associa- 

 tion and by the loan of the tube and all the instru- 

 ments which Sir William Garforth had used. 



Sir William's experiments were repeated at 

 Eskmeals and his contentions were confirmed. The 

 remedv so amply demonstrated was discounted by 

 the suggestion that the application of inert dust of 

 this nature would produce consumption amongst 

 the mine workers. It therefore became desirable 

 to test this point. The work had been taken in 

 hand by the Home Office, and as there were no 

 funds available, Sir William provided the Chair- 

 man of the Royal Commission with money, only 

 stipulating that his name should not be mentioned. 

 Stone-dusting in mines has become a regular 

 practice, and when it becomes universally adopted 

 there is no doubt coal-dust explosions will be 

 entirely eliminated from our mines. Sir William's 

 work on mine rescue apparatus also had a great 

 influence in the industry; He was rewarded by 

 seeing a medal conferred upon one of his own 

 miners who used his apparatus in the rescue of 

 some imprisoned men. 



To those who knew Sir William Garforth he 

 was a warm friend. He was a man of singular 

 breadth of vjew ; with a great deal of Yorkshire 

 doggedness he combined a very open mind, being 

 always ready to sacrifice his views if they were 

 shown to be wrong. The recent strike went very 

 much to his heart. He had always taken a pride 

 in demonstrating to his friends the good terms he 

 maintained with his miners, and even in a district 

 in which the Featherstone riots had occurred he 

 was always greeted with a smile whenever he went 

 to the mine. But during the last strike the temper 

 had changed, and in the opinion of one of his 



NO. 2713, VOL. 108] 



friends who saw him this summer it contributed to 

 a depression which ended in heart failure. He was 

 a typical coal owner, a typical Yorkshireman, and 

 a typical Englishman, and it will be a bad day for 

 the country if such men are to disappear. 



The death is announced of M. Alfred 

 Grandidier, the eminent French geographer and 

 explorer, on September 12, at the age of eighty- 

 four years. M. Grandidier began his travels at 

 an early age when, accompanied by his brother, 

 M. E. Grandidier, he made a tour of the world, 

 devoting much time to journeys in the little- 

 known plateau of Bolivia and the Cordilleras of 

 southern South America. In 1863 he set out for 

 India with the intention of trying to penetrate into 

 Tibet. To equip himself for that difficult journey 

 he proposed to spend some time studying 

 Buddhism in Ceylon. Illness, however, caused 

 him to change his plans and took him to 

 Zanzibar, and later to Madagascar, where 

 he landed for the first time in 1865. During 

 the next five years M. Grandidier spent 

 most of his time in that island exploring 

 its almost unknown interior and crossing it 

 in several directions, besides carrying out im- 

 portant anthropological and linguistic work. On 

 his explorations are based the first accurate know-- 

 ledge and the first general map of Madagascar, 

 and the Revue Scientifique, in a notice of his work, 

 points out that M. Grandidier was largely instru- 

 mental in establishing French rule and order in 

 Madagascar. His great work, " L'Histoire poli- 

 tique, physique et naturelle de Madagascar," on 

 which he had been engaged for the last half cen- 

 tury, is still incomplete, although some ten 

 volumes have already been published. Its com- 

 pletion is now to be undertaken by his son. 

 M. Grandidier received the Gold Medal of the 

 Paris Geographical Society in 1872, and was 

 President of the Society from 1901 to 1905; he 

 was also a member of the Institute of France, and 

 last July was made a comm.ander of the Legion 

 of Honour. 



The death is announced, in his fifty-eighth year, 

 of Dr. Joseph W. Richards, professor of metal- 

 lurgy since 1903 at Lehigh University, where he 

 had served for several years previously as in- 

 structor and assistant professor. In 1902 he was 

 elected the first president of the American Electro- 

 Chemical Society, and he was also a member of 

 the Faraday Society and the Iron and Steel In- 

 stitute. He had been a member of many tech- 

 nical boards and juries at expositions, as well as 

 of the U.S. Navy Consulting Board. His con- 

 tributions to scientific literature were concerned 

 mainlv with blast-furnace operations and the 

 electro-metallurgy of iron and steel. 



We are informed that Mr. Benjamin Harrison 

 died on September 30, and not on October i, as 

 stated in last week's issue of Nature, p. 251. 



