Geordie in dismay whether nothing could be done to prevent such terrible
disasters in future. "The price of coal-mining now," he said, "is
pitmen's lives." Stephenson promised to think the matter over; and he
did think it over with good effect. The result of his thought was the
apparatus still affectionately known to the pitmen as "the Geordie
lamp." It is a lamp so constructed that the flame cannot pass out into
the air outside, and so cause explosions in the dangerous fire-damp
which is always liable to occur abundantly in the galleries of coal
mines. By this invention alone George Stephenson's name and memory might
have been kept green for ever; for his lamp has been the means of saving
thousands of lives from a sudden, a terrible, and a pitiful death. Most
accidents that now occur in mines are due to the neglect of ordinary
precautions, and to the perverse habit of carrying a naked lighted
candle in the hand (contrary to regulations) instead of a carefully
guarded safety lamp. Yet so culpably reckless of their own and other
men's lives are a large number of people everywhere, that in spite of
the most stringent and salutary rules, explosions from this cause (and,
therefore, easily avoidable) take place constantly to the present day,
though far less frequently than before the invention of the Geordie
lamp.

Curiously enough, at the very time when George Stephenson was busy
inventing his lamp at Killingworth, Sir Humphrey Davy was working at
just the same matter in London; and the two lamps, though a little
different in minor points of construction, are practically the same in
general principle. Now, Sir Humphrey was then the great fashionable
natural philosopher of the day, the favourite of London society, and the
popular lecturer of the Royal Institution. His friends thought it a
monstrous idea that his splendid life-saving apparatus should have been
independently devised by "an engine-wright of Killingworth of the name