One of the earliest reported uses of the Davy lamp occurred in North Wales. Among his papers Davy preserved a letter, dated 27 January 1817, from Mr John Morris of Plas Issa, a colliery near Acrefair, to John Simmons Esq., Paddingtonhouse. Following an explosion of firedamp in one of Simmons's mines, ‘by which several of the men were dreadfully burnt and bruised’, Morris ordered some lamps. Neither he nor the colliers had any experience of them and in the absence of instructions Morris read out an account from the Edinburgh Review. The men, who had previously ‘secretly treated them with some contempt’, were now ordered to take the lamps into the pit for a trial, but their wives, Morris wrote, ‘made so much noise and lamentation that it was with some difficulty that I could keep them off’. The experiment was concluded without mishap, all the men in the district being ‘astonished and amazed that so simple-looking an instrument should destroy and defy an enemy heretofore unconquerable’. The reference to ‘destroying’ firedamp suggests that the principle of the lamp had not been fully grasped (Davy's Collected Works, Vol. 6, 1825, p. 99).

Inspectors' reports for North Wales later in the century refer frequently to accidents allegedly due to breaches of the regulations concerning safety lamps. Higson described an explosion which occurred in 1862 at Gardden Lodge Colliery near Ruabon, killing a miner.