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Hundreds gathered at Windy Gully cemetery last Thursday and lit 96 candles to remember the lives lost in the 1902 mining disaster in Mount Kembla.
It is fitting then that exactly a week later a talk will be held in Wollongong about Sir Humphry Davy and the miner’s safety lamp he invented 199 years ago.
Wollongong architect Andrew Conacher will give the lecture about his illustrious forbear on August 7 at Illawarra Museum in Market Square from 10am.
Mr Conacher said his family was descended from Sir Humphry’s brother’s family.
‘‘We are quite proud of this family connection. Sir Humphry basically popularised science in England around 1800,’’ he said.
In the Illawarra, Sir Humphry was best known for inventing the miner’s safety lamp.
‘‘The really nice thing about that is that he refused to patent it, so anyone could afford to make it to save lives in coal mines,’’ Mr Conacher said.
‘‘The sad thing was that the mine owners didn’t always have the workers’ best interests at heart. They often used it [lamp] to get the workers to go into more dangerous places in mines because they figured that they now had something which would help the miners when there was gas in the mines.
‘‘Ironically, like the motorcar was supposed to ease pollution in the city by getting rid of all the horseshit, the miner’s safety lamp in practice often resulted unfortunately, through the greed of the owners, in more fatalities than had happened previously, as mining expanded and the owners thought they could take more risks with their staff.’’
The free lecture on Thursday will look at the life and times of Sir Humphry.
‘‘I have a number of artefacts to display, including a biography written by his brother John and a copy of the original design of the safety lamp and an example of its more contemporary equivalent.’’