What is the meaning of canary in a coalmine?

Answer 1

Miners used to take canaries into coalmines. If the canary stopped singing, it was a sign to the miners that they needed to leave the mine immediately. It indicated the presence of methane gas. Cruel bastards.

Answer 2

The word skill that something is getting used ans a sophisticated warning call. An occasion may be that the upward push interior the fee of foreclosure on subprime mortgages in mid-previous due 2008 served as a canary interior the coalmine for the U. S. financial device. It refers back to the previous coal miners' use of canaries in mines to hit upon rises of carbon Monoxide interior the air. Canaries are lots extra gentle to CO poisoning and can pass out or die while the CO tiers rose interior the mine. The miners might word and evacuate to permit the mine to air out and no person (different than the fowl) might get harm.

Answer 3

A canary in a cage would be lowered in to a mine before the men. It would be brought back up and if it was still alive the men would go down.

The canary was sensitive to the poisonous methane and carbon monoxide gasses in mines and would die pretty quickly. Carbon monoxide, for example, cannot be smelled, so the miners would not know if the gas was building up in the tunnels.

They were also taken down with the men, and if the canary snuffed it then the men would know to leg it back up to the surface pretty quick!

It was easy to spot a dead bird because it would fall off it's perch.

They are probably responsible for saving many hundreds of thousands of mens lives.

To use it as a comparison for something else could mean one or two things. Something could be either:

As simple as using a canary in a coalmine
That is to say that something incredibly simple could be incredibly useful to solve a problem. Therefore something good.

Or:

As costly as using a canary in a coalmine
That in order to help the majority, the minority have to be sacrificed. Therefore something bad (at least in many peoples opinions).

CG.

Answer 4

this means that something very simple can be lifesaving.

it comes from the mining days when workers wanted to check for excessive amounts of either silica or carbon in the air (i'm not sure if those are the right ones, but it was something like that). to stay underground and breathe the polluted air could be hazardous, so they would send a canary into the mine. canaries have a very low tolerance for said pollutant, whatever it may be, so if the bird came back dead, the miners would go somewhere else.

i found this web page--it explains it a lot better than i did.
oh, and the pollutant was methane gas.

http://www.petcaretips.net/canary-coal-mine.html

Answer 5

Miners send down canaries first--and they keep canaries with them. Because if they dig into pockets of lethal gas, the canaries will die first, acting as a barometer. Dead bird=get out. Today, the expression “canary in a coal mine” is used to indicate a warning, a sign to take notice of a change that has taken place (or is about to.) For example, Israel is considered the world's canary (of democracy) in the Middle East.

If you're worried about canaries, they don't use them for coal mines nowadays. They use meters that measure methane gas.

Which makes me wonder if PETA and the aspca would like us to get all the canaries out of Israel.

Answer 6

Mines have toxic orderless gasses and before modern techno monitoring , they used canaries -
When the canary died, time to leave quickly.

Nowadays , something that is an indicator of a bigger problem.

Answer 7

Birds are very sensitive to poisonous gasses, if it dies, get the hell out of there 'cause you're next! Over heating a teflon pan in your house can kill a bird, it emits a poisonous gas.