Suffer And Survive: The Extreme Life of JS Haldane by Martin Goodman (Pocket Books, £8.99) (From The Northern Echo)

Suffer And Survive: The Extreme Life of JS Haldane by Martin Goodman (Pocket Books, £8.99)

5:53pm Tuesday 3rd March 2009 in

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THE name John Scott Haldane should be familiar to every mining family – and perhaps is. He was an Oxford University academic, who conceived the idea of using canaries in mines to detect gas.

A lecturer in physiology, he recommended this safety measure in the wake of an explosion in a South Wales colliery in 1884, which killed 281 men and boys. He initially proposed using white mice but switched to canaries because miners disliked mice and wouldn’t have had faith in them.

Martin Goodman explains: “Birds would do just as well. They had a similar metabolism and body surface to mice. They were less easy to handle, less easy to revive, but the effects of gas on a small bird can be even more conspicuous. A mouse collapses, a bird falls off its perch.

“A dark bird might be hard to see in the dim light of a mine. But a caged canary maybe? Miners could be more comfortable with that.”

Haldane went on to devise the gas mask, perfected only after he had breathed the deadly gas to assess its make up. A non-swimmer, he also leapt overboard in a full diving suit to solve the problem of the bends.

Such derring-do lends itself to Goodman’s racy approach, delivering a narrative that grips like a good novel. But his research is solid and the result a good read about a man who deserves to be better known even beyond the mining community.