Hekki to anyone coming from Womble! Have a nice evening :)

My fathers first job was as a safety officer in the Derbyshire coal mines where he saw men killed in horrific fire accidents, when he retired the one memento he kept was a Davy lamp.

Brilliant. Literally.

Amazing. I can only imagine how exited he must have been, at that pivotal moment of "That's IT!" It seems that a majority of the most significant solutions in history, are the simplest. My favorite are the one's either discovered by accident, or better yet solved by kids.

@markylon

8 ай бұрын

Do you mean excited? Not sure what an exit has to do with anything 😅

A very simple explanation that reveals why we used wire gauze with our Bunsen burners in chemistry lab when heating flasks.

From what I remember from my school days, if firedamp was present it would form a blue edge to the flame of the Davy Lamp. This is why in later years with electric light each team needed to carry a Davy Lamp not for illumination be as a gas indicator.

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

+Robert Fletcher you get the blue halo if the concentration is almost high enough for an explosion, but not quite. Like an early warning. If the concentration is higher, you get blue flames randomly moving around the inside of the wire mesh.

@unvergebeneid

8 жыл бұрын

+kurtilein3 That must have been quite the weird feeling, knowing that if you weren't carrying a Davy lamp but a regular lamp, you'd all be already dead.

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

Penny Lane Yes, with an open flame you could also get the blue halo, and then it means OH SHIT and you extinguish the flame with your hand (blowing it out could cause an explosion), and then basically stumble to safety in the dark. The second thing, when flames move around the inside of the cage, would simply be BOOM YOU ARE DEAD with an open flame. The new lamps were instantly popular because they so obviously worked, as soon as word spread many miners simply refused to go down until they got the new lamps.

@0ldw3lshm4n

6 жыл бұрын

Sorry but this is not true. The test flame, set low then first indication of gas is just below 1.25% which is no where near explosive. I have no idea what you mean about randomly moving flame in the mesh but if the gas was that concentrated yoy would have been asphyxaited before you saw that. At 1.25% methane in general body of air (ie not in the roof) electricity had to be switched off, if it reached 2% (nice evenly shaped triangle) you would have to withdraw men to safety. The percentage of gas required to explode is between 5% and 15% with 9.8% being the most explosive. 5% in a lamp and the flame is close to the top. If somehow you had more than the it would extinguish flame. You could test up to 20% using an aspirator which you would raise to the roof where high concentration may be and fill it and insert it into lamp and squeeze gently.

Keeping the spirit of the Davy Lamp alive

Thank you so much for explaining the gauze! I dove into a Wikipedia rabbit hole today and ended up in mine disasters but couldn’t grasp the explanation for how the gauze worked. But having the demonstration and explanation the way the presenter did here made a world of difference.

One of the best use of the 5 minutes of my life.🙏

Your video is the first I have ever seen, that shows how the Davy safety lamp works! From what I understand, when the miner saw his safety lamp flame flare up, as you showed, they were supposed to leave the area, and the area would be ventilated to lower the amount of gas in the air. The reason for that is, you never wanted to be working where your tool could create a spark, which could then ignite the gas.

Thank you so much Andy for this amazing video! A reminder of what a scientist could do to protect the people around. Thanks! Please post more!!

I would have liked it if you would have shown the proof of the hypothesis, by heating up the wiremesh till the flame could pass through it.

@robertbackhaus8911

8 жыл бұрын

+WakarimasenKa That would have meant heating it up to the ignition temperature of the methane/air mix, and then it would have ignited the gas at the mesh before the flame reached it. Maybe there is a narrow range where the pre-heated mesh is below the ignition point, but would be heated up to the ignition point by the flame ... but it would cool below that point by the time the flame arrived.

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

+Robert Backhaus You could just go at it with a blowtorch. The metal gets red hot, then the flame starts igniting on the other side as well.

@WakarimasenKa

8 жыл бұрын

kurtilein3 Thats what I was asking for.. Im pretty sure it would work.

Thanks for teaching me interesting things through easy way. I do hope, that such videos would be used in schools of tommorow. I would get the topic instantly.

No joke, this man was my physics teacher last year for GCSE

@Burning_Babylon

3 ай бұрын

Very lucky to have good teachers

Another sterling production from Andy and The Team. Plant-food for tall poppies! 👍

@TheRoyalInstitution

8 жыл бұрын

+subliminalvibes Ah, thanks :)

I wish RI would do more lectures

Wonderful story!

Wow what? I would never ever have though this. Crazy. Science!

Good Davy Sir

I learned something new today,,thank you for your time and knowledge, I appreciate it very much

This is such a timeless, educational video that is extremely well presented. This is the video I refer people for understanding the miner's safety lamps. Thank you!

In 1978 I attended a lecture at the Royal Institution for the bicentenary of Humphry Davy's birth. It was really awesome. Are there any pictures or videos from that series of lectures? I would like to see it again or even see if I can spot myself in the audience.

@TheRoyalInstitution

5 жыл бұрын

Our full video catalogue only goes as far back as 2009, and there are limited amounts of video from before then with the Christmas Lectures being the one notable exception. We have asked our archivist to see if there is any material from then and will get back to you in case we find anything!

@rpdom

5 жыл бұрын

Thank you. I suspected there wouldn't be any recordings from that era, but if you find anything that would be really great :)

That is amazing. Isn't it wonderful that people as clever as Davy existed, and exist today? We're so lucky.

Great informative video ...

I read about Davy safety lamp in class 6th 1996.....now due to internet I can see Mr. Davy's invention and his picture. He was a Baron ( didn't know this)

This is so cool

A Simple solution to a big problem

Brilliant! More like this please :)

thank you Davey I need something for my Tiki lamps in the backyard!

Amazing .. I was reading about Industrial revolution in England, where I came across this lamp's contribution for the same. Science makes me happy if it used for the good of humanity.

thats amazing

Every video o Davy's lamp shows HOW it work, but none really shows WHY it works. It'd be instructive to see the actual experiments with various gasses, various mesh sized gauze, made of various metals and metal retardant materials.

Ken Follet's 'A Place Called Freedom' brought me here.

A very informative video ...took me back to my industrial revolution history lessons

that was so cool!!!

Gueules Noires (2023) brought me here. Thanks, i enjoyed the video and learnt a lot.

What mesh size of the wire gauze do you need for this to work?

2:45 I wonder if a person was in the tube and protected from the heat of the fire if they would have trouble breathing after the fire goes out.

@godfreypoon5148

4 жыл бұрын

Yes, it's called afterdamp and it kills you very dead.

Interesting.

Imagine the first miners that got to "experience" such a methane combustion first hand....

Discovered in 1815, this lamp might have inspired Michael Faraday, Humphry Davy's assistant, to (re)discover the Faraday Cage in 1836, after Davy's death in 1829, as Faraday paused his EM work due to being accused of plagiarism by Davy (who was accused of the same by George Stephenson).

He is the modern day Davy ,I guess

AH HA!!! Hence the term 'NO NAKED FLAMES', every day is a learning day.

Who is playing the music?

Lol. I am glad to share the same name after 218 years. Now just need to create something now. Got to keep the tradition up lol.

In spite of his many contributions to science, I still reckon that Davy's greatest discovery was Michael Faraday ;)

Cool

I came here after reading about Davy and his lamp in richard Rhodes book energy

Life is all so simple, really. We just make it difficult ourselves :)

This is a great example of how a single individual can make an enormous contribution with a very inexpensive solution. A refreshing contrast to large bureaucracies that perpetually seek as much funding as possible, irrespective of what is actually needed to solve the problem at hand.

@notsyort

8 жыл бұрын

+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky Don't conflate science with bureaucracy. When effect sizes are small and nuanced, large studies are needed to detect them, and to distinguish them from background noise. Such studies necessarily require large amounts of resources, and therefore funding. It's practically unsurprising, that the cheapest discoveries are the ones that are the easiest, and the first to be done. Inventing 'the' wheel was easy; doing 1000 mph in a rocket car requires a lot more effort.

@EugeneKhutoryansky

8 жыл бұрын

+notsyort, I don't deny that there are many cases where a large amount of funding is justified. However, there is unfortunately also a culture which tends to always seek additional funding, regardless of if it is justified.

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

+Physics Videos by Eugene Khutoryansky and only fools give their money to unjustified causes. Smart people do research before approving funding. There are also always fraudsters who will try to get you to give them money. The smart thing is to be smart, the dumb thing is to give your money to fraudsters and to then complain about the existence of fraudsters.

@MsSomeonenew

7 жыл бұрын

It is a great example where the first salesman get the credit, like he said in the video there were many other developing the idea but people only remember the biggest seller. In the same way kids are still told in school Edison invented the lightbulb, when in fact he was only the biggest salesman, and 200 yeas from now it would not at all surprise me if Steve Jobs gets proclaimed the inventor of mobile phones.

@theultimatereductionist7592

7 жыл бұрын

+notsyort THANK you for debunking that usual idiotic populist political propaganda from Eugene K.

4:05 Sorry, these are NOT naked flames. They are caged flames.

"Gauze" = metal screen.

If your Davy lamp goes out while down in a mine, how do you relight it safely?

@CTimmerman

7 жыл бұрын

Outside or near a gas detector that says it's safe.

So... does this mean that those aerosol can flamethrowers that teenagers make will not explode in use (assuming short bursts that do not melt the nozzle)? I'm guessing the nozzle on the can is too small to propagate the flame, combined with lack of oxygen inside the can and the fact that the 'fuel' is being pushed out under pressure? This is just a curiosity of course, those days are long gone for me!

if the metal gauze heated up to the same temperature as the flame would it then be able to go through it??

@CTimmerman

7 жыл бұрын

Perhaps, but at that point the gauze itself could ignite the gas outside. In a Geordie lamp, glass stops the flame from being blown at a nearby spot of gauze, but back then glass was extremely fragile.

1/4 the brightness of a candle and unsafe in a draft in excess of 8ft per second. Hard to say that this lamp revolutionized anything, really. It seems its best use may have been as an indicator of the presence of the flammable gas without immediately igniting it. Easy times these weren’t!

Is this a viable solution for gas leaks

A Faraday cage is very similar to a Davy lamp... Just a shower thought.

would this not be considered engineering?

Would such a lamp violently flash in an environment with a flamable amount of methane in the air? That would also make them methane detectors with automatic alarm lights. Or would they just burn of the methane that gets inside the mesh at a steady rate and you see nothing special happening?

@crolynx4033

Жыл бұрын

Shut up nerd

2:38 Avada Kedavra

Its a clanny lamp!

but how do you light it inside a mine? Do you just risk it and hope there is no firedamp?

@dancoulson6579

8 жыл бұрын

+Ciroluiro They were lit before entering the mine. The oil lamp type could be refilled whilst underground, as opening the oil reservoir does not expose a naked flame.

@Tomyb15

8 жыл бұрын

+Dan Coulson but what if it gets extinguished accidentally? You can't tell me that is an impossible situation. It must have happened sometime.

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

+Ciroluiro miners go down in teams and everyone has a lamp. if one goes out, no big deal, two people go up (one with a working light and the unfortunate guy), re-ignite, and come back down. Also you get an early warning in the form of a blue halo around the flame if there is dangerous gas. If that is not there, you just go back a bit to air that is a bit fresher, and light the lamp there, and come back.

@Tomyb15

8 жыл бұрын

+kurtilein3 oh, going up in teams makes sense. But the blue halo would only appear if there is a flame inside to light up the gas; unless it's like a platinum mesh that catalyses the breakdown of methane and heats up. Are they made of platinum?

@kurtilein3

8 жыл бұрын

Ciroluiro you always have several people with several lamps. no platinum. just several lamps. really basic. 5 people, 5 lamps, one goes out, 4 keep burning. its not brain surgery.

👍👍

Pov: tu regarde ça pour l'anglais car t en distanciel (force au 1c)

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@DanielSultana

8 жыл бұрын

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@LillianWinterAnimations

8 жыл бұрын

+Daniel Sultana Worlds most wordy "F1RST P0ST"

Dear R I , the deaths of 12 men at Moura No 4 Colliery in Queensland, July 1986, some of whom I had met is directly attributed to a modern flame safety lamp with dual gauzes. Consequently flame safety lamps are banned in Queensland and in many other jurisdictions. The cause is believed to be dust and methane entering the lamp, which was correctly assembled and heating the gauzes to the point where the flame propagated outside the lamp. In 1989 I saw the lamp and the equipment used to test it.

@CTimmerman

7 жыл бұрын

I find it incredible that people still used nonelectric lamps for mining as late as the 1980s. Then again, mining bosses also couldn't be bothered to move the pit heap looming over Aberfan.

@Palifiox

7 жыл бұрын

Cees Timmerman Only the "deputy" or on the spot safety officer (aka "fire boss" in Canada) carried the flame lamp, the remaining miners had Oldham or other explosion proof electric cap lamps. The flame lamp was not used for lighting. The idea was that if the flame was adjusted to a certain low point, the presence of methane in the air would be indicated by a blue cone above the normal flame. The height of the cone indicated the proportion of methane As far as I recall, at the time hand held electronic methanometers had not long arrived on the market, were rare anywhere and possibly had not yet been approved. As far as I recall, Moura No 4 was not a particularly gassy pit, the methane was released during a fall which also stirred up dust. A full report on the incident is on-line though.

@0ldw3lshm4n

6 жыл бұрын

Methanometers been round for use, even before I started mining in 1978. They were used not for lighting but to detect , not only methane which burns with a blue flame, but also to test for blackdamp, basically a gas with excess nitrogen or carbon dioxide. This would make the lamp go out. Blackdamp is very dangerous in mines with poor ventillation as it sits close to the floor, so not good idea to sit down :-) Methanometers were used mostly for deputies to test lower percentages of methane than the flame will detect. 0.8% and cannot fire explosives in coal. A lamp was used to detect 1.25% and above, indicated by various flame.

Nowadays, we have sensors that detect the percentage of any other noxious gases (carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, etc) in the air. (There's a lot of pretty scary stuff in the deep places of the Earth.) Thank the Gods that coal-mining is slowly going out of fashion.

Loved this video! If you want to know more about Davy (who was an interesting character whose first rose to fame due to his love of laughing gas) check out my video on him: kzread.info/dash/bejne/gKlo1c9-gaa_frw.html

Well some historical accounts claim otherwise, that the lamps would have miners venture into previously deemed unsafe environments and by extent cause more accidents. Also most being made with simple steel mesh it could very easily rust through and make it just as dangerous as an open flame, all while giving them a sense of security that wasn't there. Of course statistics are a bitch when no one keeps the whole picture, so if one side is more right then the other can't actually be confirmed.

@FortunaFortesJuvat

3 жыл бұрын

As early as the 1840s, various commissions reached the same conclusion- that the Davy provided a false sense of security, and allowed more dangerous seams of coal to be worked. The earliest ones used iron wire, which rusted easily, and tripping and dropping it would also damage it badly enough to render it useless. The Davy also gave off very poor light (only 1/4 of a candle) and miners would sometimes open them for more light or to light pipes. Some mines only issued them to overmen and deputies, and they would use them to determine if it was safe for the miners to use candles. Later lamps had reflectors for better light, layers of gauzes and chimneys so the lamps would remain safe in air currents, and interlocks so that dropping or attempting to open a lamp would extinguish it.

Institution? Or Society? FRS

Beautiful walking bass phrases.

Okay. Dude. Great video. Thank you and please continue. Seriously man. Back up from the camera. Extreme closeups do nothing for the video and only serve to distract from the information.

And Faraday nicked the idea :)

mee-thane

I would have loved this video if you hadn't stolen it from Steve Moulds who made the same-ish video a few days ago

@zhiyuanqi9995

8 жыл бұрын

+jayden urban A few days ago? This video was uploaded in 2015 November 27. If I didn't know any better, I would assume that Steve Moulds (Whoever he is) stole it from the RI.

Why did you pick someone with a speech impediment to make hundreds of videos