The Lamp That Would Not Explode: Davy, Stephenson and the Pitmen
Coming to Wonder Inventions on 25 November 2026.
Tyneside, 1812. The firedamp explosion at Felling Colliery kills ninety-two men and boys, and the horror of the mass burial at Heworth sets two very different men to the same problem: Humphry Davy, the celebrated London chemist in a blue tailcoat, and George Stephenson, the half-lettered enginewright of Killingworth who tests his tin lamp by walking it into a live gas blower himself. Carried along with them is Kit Weatherburn, a scarred trapper boy pulled alive out of the Felling heapstead, who follows Stephenson from the colliery forge to the lecture theatre of the Royal Institution, and sees both lamps fail and hold. When a gauze lamp glows red in a draught at Hebburn and fires the stables, the quarrel over who invented what boils onto the torchlit steps of the Newcastle Assembly Rooms, where gentlemen receive silver plate and pitmen press a purse on their own man. The story ends thirteen years later in a courtyard of lamps in London and, finally, on the Skerne Bridge at Darlington, where the lamp hangs on the front of a locomotive and the quarrel matters less than the light.
About this story
- Length
- 10 illustrated pages
Who appears
- George Stephenson — colliery enginewright, Killingworth; inventor of the 'Geordie' lamp
- Humphry Davy — gentleman chemist of the Royal Institution; inventor of the wire-gauze lamp
- Nicholas Wood — young colliery viewer, Stephenson's ally and recorder of evidence
- Reverend John Hodgson — curate of Heworth who buried the Felling dead and wrote to the chemists
- Kit Weatherburn — Felling trapper boy who survives the blast and follows Stephenson
What happens on 25 November 2026
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