Rethinking the Distribution of Cultural Capital in the “Safety Lamp Controversy”: Davy vs Stephenson in Letters to the Newcastle Press, 1816-17

摘要

A little over two hundred years ago, on 5 December 1815, a well-attended meeting of the members of the Literary and Philosophical Society of Newcastle upon Tyne took place. The purpose of this meeting, in the first city of the British coal trade, was to display several examples of the recent invention of the miners’ safety lamp. The various lamps presented were designed to provide a safe light in coal mines in the presence of “fire-damp”: the naturally occurring, highly flammable mixture of gases that would explode when exposed to a naked flame, and which, in the first years of the nineteenth century, had caused several horrific mining disasters below ground, such as that at Felling Colliery on 25 May 1812, when ninety-two miners were killed. A detailed, and sobering, record of mining fatalities in the north-eastern coalfield is provided by the Durham Mining Museum; their online database of colliery disasters speaks of the scale of the human tragedy that unfolded between 1800 and 1815, and thus of the pressing need for an effective means of risk reduction. Present at the Newcastle meeting was the botanist Nathaniel Winch, who sent a report of it, signed “N.,” to the Philosophical Magazine (James 223). Winch devotes a large section of his account to describing the lamp produced by George Stephenson, an “engine-wright at Killingworth Colliery,” before concluding:From what has been already said, together with the inclosed [sic] section, an invention nearly similar to Sir H. Davy’s will be immediately recognised; but that it has not been pirated from that gentleman is a fact known to most of the mine owners here; … Sir Humphry Davy’s discovery flowed from science judiciously applied. Stephenson’s discovery appears to have resulted from trials made below ground; for, though an excellent mechanic and acute man, he is unacquainted with the science of chemistry.