ABSTRACT
Michael Faraday, a fortnight after his return to London, was offered a position in the Royal Institution a little similar to that which Edmund Davy had held before going to Dublin. Michael in his turn was given a room of his own at the Royal Institution and provided with candles. As coal-mining went deeper, disasters had come to seem so irremediably inherent, in an age when the role of air in combustion had only just become understood, that people appeared resigned to dreadful happenings. Mining was not, in the same way as negro slavery, a human institution, to be relieved by human and political action. The immediate cause of the formation of the Society was an explosion at Felling Colliery, near Sunderland, which happened on May 25th, 1812. The loss of life and the hideous suffering entailed were brought home to people beyond the immediate neighbourhood by a narrative of the disaster.
