Bickford, William (1774-1834)

English inventor of the miner's safety fuse 1831. He made a major contribution to safety and productivity in mines and quarries. Bickford, born in Devonshire, set up as a leather merchant in Cornwall. Later he started a company to construct the machinery for fuse production. This firm was eventually merged into what would become Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). When used for blasting in mines, gunpowder was put into a borehole and lit by a fuse that was generally made of goose quills. Quill fuses frequently seemed to fail but then rekindled so that the miner who went to inspect the apparently extinct fuse was injured in the blast. Bickford came up with a safety fuse that virtually eliminated this danger. A given length burned in a given time, and it had better resistance to water. Several holes could be fired at a time. Fuses based on this design were still being used in the 1950s.