It might have been fairly expected that, in a district which had been so continually and so awfully visited by explosions, against which no human foresight had as yet been able to provide a remedy, the disinterested services of the greatest chemist of the age would at least have been received without a dissentient voice, and that his invention of security would have escaped the common fate of all great discoveries, and been accepted with every homage of respect and gratitude; but the inventor of the Safety-lamp was doomed to encounter a bitter hostility from persons whom a spirit of rivalry, or a feeling of hopeless emulation, had cemented into a faction.
From the period of the first announcement of the Safety-lamp, a prejudice against its use was industriously circulated amongst the miners; and some persons even maintained the monstrous proposition, that any protection against the explosions of fire-damp would injure more than it could serve the collier, by inducing him to resume abandoned works, and thus continually to inhale a noxious atmosphere.
The utility of the lamp having been established, in spite of every opposition, the claims of Sir H. Davy to its invention were next publicly challenged.
It will hereafter be scarcely believed that an invention so eminently philosophic, and which could never have been derived but from the sterling treasury of science, should have been claimed in behalf of an engine-wright of Killingworth, of the name of Stephenson--a person not even professing a knowledge of the elements of chemistry. As the controversy to which this claim gave birth has long since subsided, I would willingly have treated it as a passing cloud, had not its shadow remained. The circumstances, however, of the transaction stand recorded in the Magazines of the day, and the biographer of Davy would compromise his rights, by omitting to notice the attempts that have been made to invalidate them.
The claims which were made for the priority of Mr. Stephenson's invention of the Safety-lamp were urged in several communications in the Newcastle Courant. It has been said in reply, that if dates were taken as evidence, not merely of priority, but of originality of invention, it must follow that Mr. Stephenson's lamp was derived from that of Sir H. Davy. With regard to the first of Stephenson's lamps, the only one upon which the shadow even of a claim can be founded, it is unnecessary for the friends of truth to adopt such a line of defence; indeed, after a deliberate examination of all that has been published on the subject, I am very willing to believe that Mr. Stephenson did construct the lamp which dates its origin from the 21st of October 1815, without any previous knowledge of the conclusions at which Davy had arrived; for it was first announced to the Coal-trade by Mr. R. Lambert on the 3rd of November, to the very meeting at which Sir H. Davy's private letter was inadvertently read.--But what were the principles, and what the construction of this lamp?