Brilliant_ The Evolution of Artificial Light - Jane Brox [20]
It was said that the open flame of the first known lighthouse, the Pharos, could be seen a hundred miles away. Although that is certainly an exaggeration, the Pharos was an impressive structure. Built for the port of Alexandria in the third century B.C., its light—which was intensified and projected by a curved mirror or polished metal disk—was housed in the cupola of a rectangular marble structure that rose about four hundred feet above the low-lying Egyptian shore. At the time, only the pyramids stood taller. By comparison, eighteenth-century shore lights were far more modest, and on a clear night a well-maintained beacon might be seen five, six, maybe seven miles away, which was far short of some of the worst ocean perils. For instance, the rocks of the Eddystone reef, which lie nine miles off the south coast of England, extend for half a mile, and nearly all of them are submerged, the most prominent rising only three feet above water during the highest tides. According to Bathurst,
The rust-colored gneiss is as resilient as diamonds, and the currents that surround it send up abrupt spouts of water even on the calmest days. It is thought of as a bad-tempered place, full of sulks and strange moods, and by the sixteenth century its reputation for destruction had already spread well beyond Cornwall.... Merchant captains were so alarmed by the prospect of being wrecked on the Eddystone that they often ran themselves aground on the Channel Islands or the northern French coast trying to avoid it.
It was at Eddystone, on rock fully exposed to the sea, that the first offshore light, engineered and built by Henry Winstanley, was completed in 1698. Winstanley secured the structure by driving twelve iron rods into the highest rock on the reef. He then surrounded the rods with stone. Glaziers, smiths, masons, and carpenters made trips from Plymouth almost daily when the weather held. They moved tons of material from their boats to the rock even in rough seas and accomplished their work as the tides rose and fell around them. D. Alan Stevenson wrote:
At midsummer the party decided to lodge in the tower, hoping to save the time and labour spent in passage between Plymouth and the reef. But during the first night a storm of exceptional severity for the season arose unexpectedly and no boat could approach to take them off. With little shelter ... they were marooned in the roofless tower for 11 days [and finally] got ashore in a half-drowned condition. When the weather improved, undeterred by the unhappy experience, they returned to complete the lighthouse and lighted it on the 14th November.... In the following months the waves over-topped the lantern and Winstanley saw that he must raise it.
The next year, Winstanley built an almost entirely new structure, forty feet taller than the first. His second light lasted three years before severe winter weather damaged it. When Winstanley returned to the rock again to oversee repairs, he, his workmen, and the keeper were caught on the reef during one of the fiercest storms ever recorded along that coast. After the weather cleared, there was no sign of any man, and all that was left of the light were a few twisted pieces of metal—remnants of the rods that had tied the tower to the rock.
The third tower at Eddystone—a timber sheath packed with stone, built by John Rudyard—stood for fifty years until the wooden lantern that housed the flame caught fire. The light from the conflagration, seen from the English shore, reached farther than the beacon ever had. According to Stevenson,
Quickly the fire got a grip of the tower, the flames extended downwards over their heads and drove the men from room to room until they found shelter in a cleft in the Rock ... while burning embers and red-hot bolts rained down.... One of the lightkeepers ... declared that when looking upward during their descent of the burning tower, a quantity of molten