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And if miners couldn't use even a mill, they had little else to rely on for illumination. When a flint mill at the Wallsend Colliery caused an explosion that killed nine miners, "work was continued in the shaft without it and with the greatest difficulty. For some time it was performed in total darkness, aided only by light reflected from the surface by means of a mirror during periods of sunshine." Perhaps the strangest form of light was used in the Tyne mines, known to be "gassy" or "fiery." There colliers "sometimes tried to carry on their work by the feeble light of phosphorous and putrescent fish."

The first practical miners' safety lamps were developed around 1815, and the one devised by Sir Humphry Davy, later head of the Royal Society in London, proved to be the most popular. Davy enclosed a flame within a wire mesh cylinder, which distributed the fire's heat and prevented the air beyond the lamp from reaching the ignition temperature of firedamp. Although his lamp was quickly put into wide use, it didn't slow the number of mine deaths. Because of the mesh, the Davy lamp shed only about one-sixth the light of a common taper, so miners often continued to work by candlelight as well. The use of safety lamps also encouraged men to work deeper in the mines and open up more fiery seams. As a result, the mines became even more dangerous. The inventors of safety lamps, one mining historian suggests, "had provided the miner with a weapon of defense: armed with it he was led forward to meet fresh perils. They had sought to bring security of life: they achieved an increase in the output of coal."

By the time Davy developed his safety lamp, an increase in the output of coal had become essential. Not only was the Industrial Revolution speeding up, but coal gas possessed an increasing value. In addition to illuminating the workrooms in factories, gas was illuminating streets and shops and homes in the city of London. Bringing gaslight beyond the factories had required the sustained effort of its promoters, who had to overcome opposition from whale oil and tallow interests and the skepticism of some prominent scientists. Sir Humphry Davy himself thought the idea so absurd that he asked "if it were intended to take the dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer." Five years after Murdoch successfully lit the Soho forge, gas streetlamps made their first modest appearance. In 1807 a section of Pall Mall was outfitted with lamps to celebrate the king's birthday. It would be another five years before German immigrant and entrepreneur Frederick Albert Winsor (born Friedrich Albrecht Winzer) established the world's first gas lighting company, the Chartered Gas Light and Coke Company in London.

Winsor knew of Lebon's thermolampe and envisioned the home system writ large for an entire neighborhood. As Wolfgang Schivelbush notes, "Winsor was not the original inventor of gas lighting.... But he established the concept that allowed gas lighting to make the transition from individual to general use: the idea of supplying consumers of gas from a central production site by means of gas mains." Winsor's company, with its single gasometer, delivered gas for street lighting, commercial establishments, and wealthy homeowners in Westminster, Southwark, and the surroundings, including Westminster Bridge. Its brilliance and relative cleanliness was immediately apparent and appealing. Gaslight, it was claimed, shed "a brightness clear as summer's noon, but undazzling and soft as moonlight.... Those who have been used only to the brilliancy of oil and candle-light, can have no adequate idea of the effect of an illumination by gas. It so completely penetrates the whole atmosphere, and at the same time is so genial to the eyesight, that it appears as natural and pure as daylight, and it sheds also a warmth as purifying to the air as cheering to the spirits."

Once established, gaslight spread quickly throughout London. By the early 1820s, nearly