Felling

11:30 on a May morning

At half past eleven on the morning of 25 May 1812, an explosion tore through the John Pit at Felling Colliery, followed instantly by a second from the neighbouring William Pit. Felling had one of the deepest, most modern collieries on Tyneside, but like every pit of its age it was lit by open candles or spark-throwing "steel mills," either of which could ignite the methane, or firedamp, seeping from the coal. It took weeks to recover the dead; the body of the 92nd and final victim was never found.

Ninety-two names

The disaster killed 92 men and boys — three-quarters of the shift underground that morning, some as young as eight years old. It remains one of the worst mining disasters Britain had then seen, and, because the local rector, Reverend John Hodgson, meticulously recorded and published an account of the tragedy and its victims, it became the first such disaster to attract sustained national attention. A memorial obelisk listing the dead still stands in Heworth churchyard nearby.

A safer lamp for every pit

Hodgson's campaigning helped found the Society for the Prevention of Accidents in Coal Mines in 1813, whose members set out to solve the problem of underground lighting once and for all. Within two years, that effort had produced two of the era's landmark inventions: Sir Humphry Davy's Davy lamp and, developed independently and almost simultaneously on Tyneside, George Stephenson's own miners' safety lamp, still known locally as the Geordie lamp. Both used fine wire gauze to let light out while keeping flame away from the surrounding gas — a design that would save uncountable lives in the century of deep mining that followed.