Word: firedamp
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...emissaries lead him into a web of indiscretion with their caviar, theater tickets, and Paris dresses for his wife. And there is also the Burgess counterpart of this story-Kevin Chalmers-whose chichi accent is cruelly transcribed: "I'd just had about four gallons of a positively toxic firedamp called a Gibson ..." Chalmers is not only a drunk who has been kicked out of the British embassy in Washington (as was Burgess), but a pervert and a brawler. Chance, security officers, and their own folly put him and Gleave in the same boat, headed for anonymity and dishonor...
...mine disaster. Produced by oldtime Documentary-Maker John Grierson, the picture is based on a real-life disaster in the Knockshinnock Castle Colliery in 1950. It tells of a mine cave-in and the rescue of 118 miners trapped for two days in West No. 4 section between the firedamp and a flooded pit shaft...
Live canaries, which used to be carried down into coal mines as sentinels against firedamp, are not often stationed in modern chemical laboratories. Nevertheless, Dr. Harold Clayton Urey and his coworkers* at Columbia University have kept canaries within sniffing distance of their apparatus for months. Reason: the chemists were working with two deadly poisons, hydrogen cyanide (used in some U. S. States to execute condemned criminals) and sodium cyanide. If these began to leak from the apparatus, the sensitive little birds would collapse in time for the men to take action. Pacific, round-faced, gum-chewing Dr. Urey...
...firedamp. It is 77.5% to 98.2% methane ("marsh gas"), mixed with almost negligibe quantities of other poisonous, highly inflammable gases. Its presence is usually detected by a pale, violet-blue "cap" above the miners' safety-lamps...
...Firedamp is a gas given oft by coal when freshly exposed to the atmosphere, which, when mixed with from four to twelve times its volume of air, is explosive. A common name for it is marsh gas; in substance, it is carbureted hydrogen, oxygen...