16 questions · Technology
On the night of 26 to 27 November 1703 the worst storm England had ever known swept across the Channel. By morning nothing was left of the first lighthouse on the Eddystone reef off Plymouth, and its builder Henry Winstanley, who had gone out that very night to inspect it, had vanished with it. Four towers in all were built on that reef. The third, raised in 1759 by John Smeaton from interlocking granite blocks, now stands on dry land on Plymouth Hoe, because the rock beneath it began to crumble. Lighthouses are buildings set against the impossible. The Tower of Hercules in A Coruña has shone since Roman times, Cordouan in the Gironde estuary, with its chapel and royal apartments, is called the “Versailles of the sea”, and Bell Rock off Scotland has defied a reef that almost disappears at high tide since 1811. In the outer Weser, engineers sank a huge caisson into the seabed to build Roter Sand, while Westerheversand on its mound in the salt marshes became the postcard image of North Frisia. Even the Statue of Liberty was officially a lighthouse for a few years. The light owes its reach to Augustin Fresnel, whose stepped lens from 1823 carried a small flame all the way to the horizon. Where no tower could stand, a lightship lay at anchor. And it took people: on Ar-Men off Brittany the keepers spoke of “the hell of hells”, and on the Flannan Isles all three men vanished without trace in December 1900. Today almost every lighthouse runs automatically. The tallest, at 133 metres, stands in the port of Jeddah, Cape Hatteras rolled inland on rails in 1999, and the Lanterna still watches over Genoa. Virginia Woolf even devoted a novel to a lighthouse.
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Roter Sand
The first caisson tipped over in 1881; only the second attempt succeeded. That makes the tower one of the first offshore structures in the world.
💡 Did you know? It has been out of service since 1964; its successor nearby is called Alte Weser.
Westerheversand
The tower, about 40 metres tall, was built at the start of the 20th century; the former keepers’ houses stand to its left and right.
💡 Did you know? It is one of the most photographed sights on Germany’s North Sea coast.
Tower of Hercules
The Romans probably built it under Emperor Trajan; at the end of the 18th century it received its present neoclassical casing.
💡 Did you know? It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2009.
Cordouan
Completed in 1611, it is the oldest working lighthouse in France; in 1823 it was the first to receive a Fresnel lens.
💡 Did you know? Inside are a chapel and royal apartments; it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2021.
Eddystone
The first tower vanished in the Great Storm of 1703, the second burned down in 1755, and John Smeaton’s third was replaced because the rock was crumbling.
💡 Did you know? The present tower by James Douglass has been lit since 1882.
John Smeaton
For the tower he developed a lime mortar that also sets under water; he was the first to call himself a “civil engineer”.
💡 Did you know? Because the reef beneath it was being washed away, it was taken down in the 1880s and rebuilt on Plymouth Hoe.
Bell Rock
Robert Stevenson directed the work from 1807; building was only possible at low tide, when the rock briefly rose out of the water.
💡 Did you know? The rock is also called the Inchcape Rock; Robert Southey wrote a ballad about it.
Genoa
The present tower, over 70 metres tall, dates from 1543; a fire already burned on this spot in the Middle Ages.
💡 Did you know? It stands on a rock, so its light shines more than 100 metres above the sea.
Statue of Liberty
Her torch was meant to guide ships into the harbour, but it was too faint to be seen well from the water.
💡 Did you know? During those years it was run by the United States Lighthouse Board.
Augustin Fresnel
Instead of one thick, heavy lens he put together many narrow rings of glass, so the light carried much farther.
💡 Did you know? Cordouan was the first lighthouse to receive such a lens.
Lightship
Lightships lay where the seabed was too soft or too deep for a tower, for example off river mouths.
💡 Did you know? The crew often stayed aboard for weeks, even in the heaviest storms.
Flannan Isles
On 26 December 1900 the relief party found the lighthouse on Eilean Mòr deserted; James Ducat, Thomas Marshall and Donald MacArthur were never found.
💡 Did you know? The inquiry suspected that a giant wave had swept the men off the cliff edge in a storm.
Jeddah
The tower in the Red Sea port also serves as a control tower for shipping traffic.
💡 Did you know? It is more than twice as tall as the Tower of Hercules.
Cape Hatteras
The black and white spiral-striped tower, about 60 metres tall, is the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States.
💡 Did you know? It rolled on rails, and the move took just over three weeks.
Ar-Men
Building it on a tiny Breton rock constantly swept by the sea took from 1867 to 1881.
💡 Did you know? Since 1990 it has run automatically, without keepers.
Virginia Woolf
Her model was the Godrevy lighthouse near St Ives, which she knew from the summers of her childhood.
💡 Did you know? She moved the story, however, to the Hebridean island of Skye.
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