Lewis Pollard, the curator of the Museum of Science and Industry in Manchester, England, recently highlighted his favorite object in his museum's collections--this gadget, created circa 1896, used to resuscitate canaries in coal mines.
For about a century--from the 1890s through the 1980s--British coal miners had a tradition of lowering canaries into a coal mine to detect the presence of noxious gases. As the BBC explains, the "canary is particularly sensitive to toxic gases such as carbon monoxide which is colourless, odourless and tasteless.
Image: http://www.openculture.com
