3-070-930 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

George Stephenson, the Father of Railways: Stephenson experimenting with the Safety Lamp in a mine, 1881. '...he invented the safety-lamp, stimulated thereto by the frequent fatal explosions at the local mines. There is nothing more dramatic in biographical history than the way in which he tested its power at the risk of his life. Accompanied at midnight by his friend Mr. Nicholas Wood and his son Robert, he descended the pit, and, leaving them at a safe distance,...courageously held up his lamp in the midst of the gas. Certain and instant death must have followed had not his invention been complete...Sir Humphrey Davey [sic] was almost simultaneously occupied with a similar idea, but it was afterwards sufficiently established by dates and evidence that the two inventions were distinct and separate events, with this difference in favour of George Stephenson, that he had made and tested his prior to the production of the "Davey," and that when this lamp of the great scientist was sent down into the north the local pitmen were already using the "Geordie," which even to this day is regarded in the Stephenson localities as the best and most reliable lamp of the two'. From "Illustrated London News", 1881.