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By Root 794 0

cleared the way for the immense lenses of the late nineteenth century, tall as two men and over four tons in weight. Coupled with David’s adjustments to the angle and reach of the lenses, the inventions meant the Scottish lights were the most accurate and powerful in the world, capable of being turned, angled, coloured and eclipsed with unprecedented ease. Lights could now be adapted for almost any purpose. The beam could be strengthened or reduced, forced out in one direction only, rotated faster or slower, or given a different ‘character’ with the use of extra or coloured lenses. The strength of the new lenses reached up to a million candlepower. Smeaton’s twenty-four tallow candles at the Eddystone had only reached around thirty candlepower.

Experiments were also being conducted into new fuel sources. In 1860, a correspondence began between the NLB and Trinity House’s special scientific adviser, Michael Faraday, over the relative merits of ‘magneto-electric’ lighting. Faraday, now considered the founding father of electric power, was already famed for his lectures at the Royal Institution in London conducted against a backdrop of theatrical explosions. Trinity House, keen to discover whether his inventions could be applied to lighthouses, agreed to allow him to conduct a series of tests on electric lighting in 1858. Faraday, with the help of a scientist named Holmes, selected the South Foreland light for his experiments and set up a mechanism emitting around 60,000 candlepower with a colza-oil light nearby as comparison. As he reported to the Elder Brethren, the light shone strongly, but ‘has a tendency to sudden and spontaneous extinction…the liability causes an anxious watchfulness on the part of the attendant, who does not descend to the guardroom, but is constrained to stop in the lanthorn continually.’

Despite the difficulties in keeping the light on and the expense of fitting the equipment, Faraday noted triumphantly that the electric light was far brighter than the old oil lamps. ‘On going out to the hills round the Lighthouse, the beauty of the Light was wonderful,’ he reported. ‘At a mile off, the apparent streams of Light issuing from the Lantern were twice as long as those from the Lower Lighthouse and apparently three or four times as bright…The tops of the hills, the churches and the houses illuminated by it were striking in their effect upon the eye.’ He conceded that fitting new electric lights would be expensive, that the keepers would need to be retrained to deal with the light and, modestly, that the light was often so bright that it might give mariners a false impression of the distance from ship to light. But his experiments were positive enough for him to wholeheartedly recommend using electricity in many more of the English lights. ‘The light produced,’ he concluded, ‘is powerful beyond any other that I have yet seen so applied, and in principle may be accumulated to any degree; its regularity in the Lantern is great, its management easy and its care there may be confided to attentive keepers of the ordinary degree of intellect and knowledge.’

The NLB, however, was more cautious. As Faraday conceded, the new magneto-electric light was unlikely to be suitable for remote places, and would be expensive to fit and maintain. Tom took a trip to England in 1865 to inspect Faraday’s lights, and returned both impressed and concerned. He found the power of the new light as brilliant as advertised, considering approvingly that ‘in all cases superior power constitutes in reality superior safety.’ But he was wary of its habit of blacking out and pointed out that, in its present form, electric light was hopeless for remote lights like the Bell Rock or Muckle Flugga. In the short term, the dispute about its merits was subsumed by the usual trouble over lack of funds. It wasn’t until 1883 that the Board of Trade passed enough money to allow the Stevensons to set up a trial light at the Isle of May. In the meantime, the lights got by on paraffin, gas and goodwill. (Gas proved unexpectedly awkward; when fitted