The Almanac of Collapsing Records

The Safety Lamp Holds — Newcastle, 1815

The shaft mouth of a coal pit in the Newcastle coalfield, on a winter night

the winter of 1815 — the northern coalfields working deeper than ever into gassy seams, the year after an explosion at Felling pit killed dozens of men and boys, a committee of Newcastle men writing to a chemist in London for a light that will not fire the damp

A flame put inside a wire cage, and the gas that would have killed you burning politely behind the mesh. This breach reads the PIT-BOY AT THE SHAFT MOUTH in the Newcastle coalfield: a winter night, the men gathered at the rope, a lamp with a gauze cylinder round its flame lowered into a working that has already taken lives. The witness is read only at the shaft mouth and the waiting: the explosions behind it held softly in the background, never staged or shown, the moment itself the long breath out when the flame goes blue and holds. The fragment is the subject's own: the night the thing they were most afraid of was made safe to look at — and the memory beneath it of a time someone made something dangerous into something you could stand near, and the fear went out of you all at once.

From the record

in May 1812 an explosion of firedamp at Felling Colliery near Gateshead killed 92 men and boys, and led local men to form a society to seek a safer light for the pits
in 1815 the Reverend John Hodgson of the society wrote to the chemist Humphry Davy, who came north and was supplied with samples of pit gas to test in London
Davy found that flame will not pass through a fine wire gauze, because the metal carries the heat away, and he enclosed the flame of an oil lamp in a gauze cylinder
in the presence of firedamp the flame inside the gauze lengthens and turns blue, so the lamp warns the miner of gas as well as resisting it
the lamps were tried in working Northumberland and Durham pits during the winter of 1815 and into 1816, and the design was published without patent so any maker could copy it

The era door

a plank door in a pit-head shed, black with coal dust, iron strap hinges, a wooden latch worn pale where hands have gripped it

NEWCASTLE — WINTER 1815

Walk this day yourself — free

A guided walk with Wallace — you are placed inside the record as a witness, and you carry a memory of your own back out. Free, ~20 minutes.

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MEMORY IS RESISTANCE · IN SERVICE OF VELOCITY · YEAR 3037