ONE day in 1814, panic-stricken pitmen burst into George Stephenson’s cottage yards from Killingworth colliery. The pit was on fire!
Stephenson led them to the pit-head, descended the shaft and, with every man looking at him expectantly, called for volunteers. Choking in fumes, six men helped Stephenson build a wall at the mouth of the burning tunnel. Within minutes the fire was out, suffocated in its own smoke. Afterwards, miner Kit Heppel pleaded with Stephenson to do something about naked lights in the mine. The price of coal, he said, was now pitmen’s lives.
So Stephenson commissioned from Newcastle tin-smiths and glassmakers an ingenious lamp, and on October 21st, 1815, took it down the mine to a place where explosive gas fairly hissed from the coal. For a few tense minutes he was lost to sight; but when he returned, the flame had suffocated itself in its glass chamber, with no risk of explosion.
Stephenson had bet his life on it.
Précis
In 1814, at great personal risk George Stephenson extinguished a fire in the mine where he worked by starving it of oxygen. Drawing on that experience, he devised and successfully tested - again at great personal risk - a lamp which gave miners light, but would extinguish itself rather than ignite explosive gases. (52 / 60 words)