Dramatic Moments. PUT OUT THAT LIGHT

Dominion, Volume 28, Issue 100, 22 January 1935, Page 7

Dramatic Moments. PUT OUT THAT LIGHT

Here is a moment few people know anything of, but one Jhat everyone who sits by a tire or travels by train should think of, for it took away much of the danger of our coal mines. Humphry Davy invented the safety lamp, and all honour to him for the / new tool he put into the miner’s hand. But when the lamp was invented, who was to put-it .to the test? That is where John Hodgson comes in. You would never have thought it. He was a parson, an antiquary, whose great work was the history of Northumberland. He was to be.found in the British Museum, or searching among the old boohs in the Oxford Library. He.lived from-1779 to 1845, and in those years he managed to write 100 volumes of manuscripts. But the thing he did for which he ought ever to be remembered was done on a January day in 1816. It was done without any fuss. Probably John Hodgson would have smiled if you had called him a hero. All he did was to take a Davy safety lamp, light it, and go down the shaft of the Hebburn pit. There was fire-damp in the mine. Hodgson kept his lamp burning. He walked along the workings. If Davy had been wrong in his laboratory experiments the parson might have blown himself to pieces. He kept on, A miner saw him coming and could not-believe his eyes—a man walking in the pit with a light! . He must be mad! “Put that light out!” be screamed. But John Hodgson kept it, in, and a new era in mining began.