Canary in a Coal Mine: From Mine Safety Technique to Animal Metaphor

ABSTRACT

In the early twentieth-century coal miners used canaries to detect the presence of poisonous gases underground. Miners treasured canaries for their cheer, partnership, and assistance. This safety practice had largely ended in the United States by the middle of the twentieth century, but the phrase ‘canary in a coal mine’ took on an extended life as a metaphor, signaling impending disaster in a variety of situations. The metaphor’s malleability encouraged the inclusion of caged birds as a plot device. Horror and science fiction films like The Birds, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Arrival, and Bird Box use birds to signal invisible, hard-to-explain risks. The coal mine canary therefore became a sentinel for the most troubling social and political anxieties of each era. It signaled people’s worries that they could no longer identify and manage dangers in the modern world, whether those had to do with warfare, the environment, federal surveillance, social media, or epidemics. The birds’ use as a warning symbol, though, took miners’ beloved, sentient animal and turned it instead into a simple, but powerful tool. The coal mine canary’s continued prescence in popular culture also suggests that Americans remain concerned about the viability of new technologies in a rapidly changing world.

KEYWORDS:

• Mining
• horror
• science fiction
• animal studies
• technology

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the editors of this special issue and the reviewers of this article for their helpful comments. Thanks also to historian James Esposito for his research advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brian James Leech

Brian Leech is Associate Professor of History at Augustana College, where he chairs the Department of History and coordinates its Food Studies program. He is the author of The City That Ate Itself: Butte, Montana and Its Expanding Berkeley Pit (2018), which won the biennial Clark C. Spence Award for the best book in mining history from the Mining History Association.