Canaries in coal mines (2018) | Hacker News Reader

Canaries in coal mines (2018)

blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk

178 pointsbaobabKoodaa57 comments

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?

A recursive analogy?

Though a quick verbatim google search reveals no precedent in linguistics... so I may have just invented that one.

or they don't use the word recursive to describe two meanings, rather than recursion.

Unless I misread it, it seems to be the same meaning in both cases?

So, a missing canarie can mean a lack of good air, or lack of employer caring about non-human (and to some extent human) health.

> most people don't relish the idea of killing an animal even if it means their own survival

1,743 animals are killed for food per second(1) which aren't even required for their survival. And their deaths are celebrated(2)

(1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33656480

(2) https://www.google.com/search?q=i+love+animals+they+are+deli...

Killing at arm's length is very different from bearing witness to the death of an animal one has cared for.

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).

Agreed, but the topic was feelings of humans.

> most people don't relish the idea of killing an animal even if it means their own survival

When people stop and think about factory farming, they hate what they think about. The trick most people employ is to not think about it.

> When people stop and think about factory farming, they hate what they think about. The trick most people employ is to not think about it.

Exactly, this is known as "cognitive dissonance".

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.

> 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.

Maybe to you, but I imagine the distinction is less important to the animal.

People are funny. We worry about a kid stuck in a well, but sit by idly while thousands die far away.

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-...

The duality of man.

> "He concluded the explosion was caused by a build-up of carbon monoxide"

Surely that can't be correct? Typo for methane?

Edit:

Per BBC article, right gas, wrong association! The explosion was caused by methane, and Haldane identified carbon monoxide as a cause of some deaths.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-15965188

Carbon monoxide is flammable, and OSHA lists explosive limits for it, so apparently some mixtures can explode: https://www.osha.gov/chemicaldata/462

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).

These guys claim they found a coalbed methane deposit that was 6% carbon monoxide. If true, that would be rapidly fatal if it leaked into a mine. https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Composition-and-calorifi...

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

> the advent of electronic sensors in the mid-1980s

We used actual canaries into the 80s? That’s a few decades later than I would have guessed...

It seems to come from a good place, but what a torturous life for the canary. Hopefully they let the birds retire at some point?

This seems optimistic. Have you heard of pit ponies? Many lived a life without seeing light.

This isn’t ancient history either - the last one in the UK died in 2011 and there were working pit ponies in the 1990s.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pit_pony

Modern equivalents: https://web.archive.org/web/20140607102015/http://www.newsta...

Poor Old Chuggy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSqG7eU5Np8

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.

Weird. That device had to cost many times more than a canary.

Coal miners probably liked their canaries quite a bit.

Yes, and keeping and improving morale is priceless. If they perceived the canary as a companion, keep it alive was important.

Yes. Maybe there's a sense of duty and reciprocity involved, since the canary is the one saving miners' lives.

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.

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!

The canary cage needs DRM and a network connection to make sure only "authorised" canaries can be used and aren't past their expiry date nor recalled.

Combine this with a side gig of processing expired canaries.

No, no, as a side gig, you can be the canary!

these canaries are strictly on-premise, or can we shift them to the Cloud too?

Don't forget web3 on-chain canaries!

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.

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.

That's some cyberpunk contraption!

Site doesn't even load for me. The blogs are getting more bloated by the minute.

I'm guessing that it does not like my ad/script blocking. I just get a blank page. Guess they didn't need me over there.

This seems to be blogspam, I first read this article over here (years ago I think), which seems to be the original one: https://blog.scienceandindustrymuseum.org.uk/canary-resuscit...

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.

Sounds like you just defined blogspam.

Ok, we changed the URL to that from https://museumcrush.org/this-device-was-used-to-resuscitate-... after seeing your comment. I'm posting this a little later. Thanks!

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

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