That's really cool. I had assumed they always sacrificed the bird and I can't imagine everyone being OK with that over time. Regardless of the cost, most people don't relish the idea of killing an animal even if it means their own survival so it doesn't surprise me that an invention like this exists.
As the article states, I can imagine the miners responsible for this duty became attached to the birds (especially after they had a way to keep it alive).
There's a detail that got lost in the shuffle there, though. While it had been possible to detect CO presence since -- I think -- the 20s or 30s, they didn't become common until the 80s. My Dad used to fly a private plane across the country selling CO detection solutions provided by his company to factories and businesses until the late 80s (from a little company in Ann Arbor, MI). Of course, come the mid-90s, most of us had devices that could detect presence and (to a lesser degree) levels in our homes.
The symbolism is important too. If the company is dedicated to reviving the canary, then that helps miners believe that the company also cares about their lives and will work to rescue them in case of a disaster.
If they don't care about the death of the canary in the coal mine...
Huh, so the physical canary in the coal mine is also a metaphorical “canary in the coal mine” with respect to the company’s level of prudence. Is there a word for something which is analogy for itself?
I think this is something that everyone just adopts society's views on. I would wager most of the miners didn't care about the canaries at all. In early America people shot bison from trains for the hell of it. "The railroads began to advertise excursions for “hunting by rail,” where trains encountered massive herds alongside or crossing the tracks. Hundreds of men aboard the trains climbed to the roofs and took aim, or fired from their windows, leaving countless 1,500-pound animals where they died." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/where-the-buffalo-no-...
> 1,743 animals are killed for food per second(1) which aren't even required for their survival
For food. Killing an animal for the purpose of feeding people is different than an animal who you take care of, that is meant to help protect you, being killed or dying.
It might feel different to a human, but it’s the same for the animal either way. Similar to hiring a hitman, it’s no more moral to kill at an arm’s length. I believe it is less moral because there’s an additional victim (the person performing the killing).
I think cognitive dissonance is less important here than you might think.
I enjoy watching young cows play, and place minimal importance on the last 5 minutes of their lives. Get rid of farming meat doesn’t just kill them it removes them from ever having existed.
It’s true there are some horrific things that can happen in factory farms, but real effort is generally spent to minimize suffering because stressed animals don’t grow as quickly. Meat even tastes worse when the slaughtered animal suffered before their death. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-scared-animals-tas...
Also, what bothers people isn’t the same as what bothers animals. Cows are herd animals the like some personal space but it’s far less important to them than it is to us. That doesn’t mean a life in a tiny box is ok, just that feedlots can be smaller than you might think without bothering them as long as waste is properly dealt with.
I'm not sure what he made, but it was his first job so I'd imagine it was pretty terrible.
Actually, I think he would have moved on from that job a lot earlier except that the owners paid for him to get his pilots license and then paid him to fly -- something I know he really loved.
He eventually created his own startup outfitting (mostly automotive) manufacturing plants with ... just about anything. His company (being that it was actually his) also paid him to fly to various far flung (often rural) automotive plants -- it was often a business advantage that my Dad could drive 30m to the airport where his plane was stored and fly to a plant in any of the bordering states in as little as 30 minutes.
I recall a story where one of the plants was 2-3 hours from any airport you could get a commercial flight into, and you always had to connect at Chicago O'Hare[0]. The only way to get there for day shift was to take the earliest flight out, but that flight was always cancelled and everyone was tossed on the next flight that left 2 hours later. Some days took 10 hours flying commercial ... it's like a 12 hour drive from here. When the plane was available[1], there was a small landing strip 10 minutes from the plant. I'm guessing it was 3-4 hours in the air (and a lot of time over Lake Michigan) in the Piper Cherokee but I have no idea ... it no more than 40 minutes of driving, though!
[0] Which, apparently, was folly at every turn.
[1] He shared it with a few other men but his company was the one using it the vast majority of the time.
Huh, TIL. Does seem to be the incorrect gas/context in the original article though (or at least the BBC article and the post are incompatible in that respect).
The firedamp wikipedia article also names "the insidiously lethal afterdamp (carbon monoxide and other gases) which are produced following explosions of firedamp or coal dust." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Firedamp
Ooops The Last Pit Pony named Spike still lives at the Pit Pony Sanctuary in Pontypridd Wales UK. Last pit pony working was in Pantygasseg Colliery still working in October 1999, www.pitponies.co.uk
Pit Pony Spike still lives at the Pit Pony Sanctuary, Pontypridd, Wales UK. www.pitponies.co.uk
Last working Pit Ponies I knew were at Pantygasseg Colliery still working in October 1999.
Even so, that doesn't necessarily make it any less economically sound.
If it cost as much as 10 canaries, but replaced the need for 20 canaries (over a lifespan of 10-15 years), it still checks out from a business sense. And the device itself lasts for decades so it's amortized across many years. Not to mention the additional cost and complexity of a "canary supply chain". Unlike bottles of oxygen, you can't just warehouse canaries for months without constant daily care.
Now obviously there are emotional/ethical elements as well as mentioned by other commenters... but I just want to point out that these don't have to be opposed to the economics of it, but can be in addition to it.
With the device you could use one canary many times, instead of just having use for one canary one time. One could argue about the morality/ethics of using one canary many times, but it seems simpler at least than to keep tens/hundreds of canaries available at every mine.
In other words: there's an opportunity here for a startup offering subscription-based Canaries as a Service - someone will come every day to the customer to deliver new canaries and take spent ones. Canaries become the startup's responsibility, so the mine can focus on its core competency; something opex over capex, synergy etc. Invest now!
Miners would not have afforded it either, 1800's coal miners in the Midlands and southwest of England would have included a fair share of children since they could deal with narrower spaces better.
Siebe Gorman & Company Ltd was building deep diving gear in the 1800s. This would have been very niche and very expensive.
Not to be overly cynical but this was likely used as a soirée entertainment contraption rather than intended for actual mine use.
> soirée entertainment contraption rather than intended for actual mine use
Disturbing; and I seem to remember reading that people did use vacuum pumps for similar horrors. However, looking at the wear on the device in the first pic, I'm hoping that the story explained by the museum is true.
I bet that it enabled miners to get back to mining quicker, as they didn't have to bring in a replacement canary to check if the air was safe yet. So I bet that's the financial justification for the expense.
Most likely they would need a replacement canary. For humans the aftereffects of carbon monoxide poisoning can last for weeks. Canaries will probably need some time to recover too. If the canary doesn’t chirp, it probably does not function well as a warning system. You need to keep checking on it visually, which means you can only work within sight of it, and this limits your ability to work.
I'd expect that many mines have bottlenecks when exiting, like elevators, so a group of miners evacuating because their canary died might have to wait a while in some safe area to exit.
They would want to be able to monitor for gas in that safe area. So they would need a second canary. And they would have had to keep that second canary separated from the first so that when they enter some place that will kill the first it doesn't take out the second there.
That seems like it would be quite a hassle. Having one canary that can be reset after a gas detection would be a lot easier to deal with, and gives them a lot more flexibility if they can't promptly evacuate.
This article looks like an abridged publication of the one you linked to that was published about a week later in 2018. At the bottom of the article OP shared they even link to the original article and mention the original publication, "This article originally appeared on the MSIM Blog, explore more of their stories at blog.msimanchester.org.uk" So it seems more like a republishing, which is common for smaller media publications to do to expand reach
The article OP shared does not link to the original article, but to the general page where the original can be found, specifically "https://blog.msimanchester.org.uk/".
The original article also contains more images and more information. Seems fair to use the original when it is the original and also better than the copy.
I like how people in here think that someone who just spent 12 hours digging coal out of hell has enough energy left over to give even half of a shit about some bird. You think they went on a strike until the company invented this thing? Saving the birds was not a thing LOL
As the article states, I can imagine the miners responsible for this duty became attached to the birds (especially after they had a way to keep it alive).
There's a detail that got lost in the shuffle there, though. While it had been possible to detect CO presence since -- I think -- the 20s or 30s, they didn't become common until the 80s. My Dad used to fly a private plane across the country selling CO detection solutions provided by his company to factories and businesses until the late 80s (from a little company in Ann Arbor, MI). Of course, come the mid-90s, most of us had devices that could detect presence and (to a lesser degree) levels in our homes.