Free Brilliant by Jane Brox Page A

restricted by the size of the wick, and under ideal circumstances coal gas's combustion was almost complete: it burned with a whiter, clearer flame (in contrast to the reddish orange glow of most simple oil lamps and candles). Yet in the beginning, gaslight was far from perfect. There were few filters for the coal gas, which contained both hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, so a foul smell accompanied the light. (Although Murdoch's system for Phillips & Lee filtered the gas through lime, which absorbed the hydrogen sulfide and carbonic acid, this did not entirely purify it.) The gas itself was of uneven quality, its delivery was unreliable, and the equipment was crude. As William O'Dea notes, "The burners were simply iron tubes with holes pierced in them; and apart from the variable and often poor illuminating quality of [the] gas produced ... the burners quickly corroded and, even when new, over-cooled the flame." Still, the jets didn't require individual attention, and there was nothing to spill or tip. And although gas left a sooty residue, it was cleaner, too.

    If gaslight was cleaner, the grime of getting the coal to produce it rivaled that of the hunt for whale oil, as a descent into any British coal mine in the early 1800s would attest. According to a writer of the time,
Clean and orderly [the miners] coolley
[sic]
precipitate themselves into a black, smoking, and bottomless-looking crater, where you would think it almost impossible human lungs could play, or blood dance through the heart. At nearly the same moment you see others coming up, as jetty as the object of the search, drenched and tired. I have stood in a dark night, near the mouth of a pit, lighted by a suspended grate, filled with flaring coals ... the pit emitting a smoke as dense as the chimney of a steam-engine; the men, with their sooty and grimy faces ... their sparkling eyes.
    Except for that suspended grate at the mouth of the shaft, pitmen would have had almost nothing to see by. They used their candles sparingly, since methane gas—known as firedamp and present in many mines—could be ignited by an open flame. Still, they needed some illumination, both to extract coal and to check on their surroundings in order to spot structural weaknesses in the shafts, so they risked candlelight after an overman checked the workings for gas. First, the overman lit a trimmed and clean candle on the floor and placed his palm in front of it so that he saw only the spire of the flame. Then he raised the candle slowly toward the ceiling of the mine, where firedamp—lighter than air—collected. If it was present, the tip of the flame would turn blue. "This spire increases in size and receives a deeper tinge of blue, as it rises through an increased proportion of inflammable gas, till it reaches the firing point," explained an account of the time. "But the experienced collier knows accurately enough all the varieties of
shew
(as it is called) upon the candle, and it is very rarely fired upon, excepting in cases of sudden discharges of inflammable gas."
    In the best circumstances, when the overman found firedamp, he left the mine and then—so as to make it safer for work—ignited the gas by lowering a lighted candle or coal-filled iron basket down the shaft. But if he detected firedamp far inside the workings, he had no choice but to send down a man to ignite it: "Clad from head to foot in rags soaked in water, [the man] would crawl along the underground way holding in front of him a long pole at the end of which was a lighted candle. When the explosion occurred he would fling himself, face downward, on the floor, and so, with good fortune, he might escape the flame which shot along the roof above him." The man was sometimes called a penitent.
    In spite of such efforts, miners thought of explosions, and the human injuries and deaths that accompanied them, as inevitable. The history of the mines is also the history of the dead, the burned, and