My item - a petrol lamp

 

My most valuable item is the petrol lamp that my father and grandfather used to use when they were both in the mining industry. The special thing about this lamp is that it has two functions. On the one hand, they normally served as lighting, which is self-evident to everyone in the name, but the special thing and also one of the reasons why I chose this item is that it indicated how much methane gas is in the mining tunnel based on the size of the flame. Methane gas is a highly flammable gas that is released during the mining of hard coal and can explode/ignite with a small spark. Thus, this type of oil lamp was an important safety measure for the miners and protected them from such dangers. The scale shows how many square meters of methane gas there are in the mining tunnel. For me, the lamp also has a historical connection, it symbolizes, among other things, the technical progress they had at that time, as well as the fact that a large part of my family was active in mining at that time.