Life among the Lighthouses.
A minister of state, whose duties brought him into constant attendance upon royalty, once made a memorandum in his diary to watch the king into a good humour, that he might ask him for a Lighthouse. It is probable that the wish of Lord Grenville (for it was he) was not to learn what living in a lighthouse would be like, but rather to realize the very considerable living to be got out of one.
Whether his lordship ever got what he desired, we do not know; but could he have foreseen the serious penalties the nation would have to pay for having the “well-beloved cousins and councillors” of its kings quartered in this free and easy way upon its mercantile marine, surely he would have been too generous to seek it. Henry VIII. and his daughter Elizabeth were alive to the true policy in such matters, for he put the custody of such things into the charge of a chartered body, whose interests were made identical with the public welfare; and she, making her Lord High Admiral Howard surrender his authority in regard to beacons, buoys, marks and signs for the sea to their custody, gave the Elder Brethren of the Trinity House their first Act of Parliament, and set them forward upon an ever-widening career of usefulness, which has resulted in our channels being almost as well lighted as our streets.
Not but what among the proprietors of “private lights,” as those not under the control of the Trinity House were called, there were men of sagacity, energy, and self-devotion. Men who were proud of the means whereby they lived, and took the same pleasure in having their lighthouse a credit to them that an opulent manufacturer does in having his mills up to the mark with all the most recent improvements. But the same motive did not exist in the one case as does in the other. If a manufacturer does not keep in the front rank as regards machinery, the character of his goods is degraded in the market. He must choose between spinning well or not at all. But with the private manufacturers of light for bewildered sailors the case was different: they were authorized to levy tolls on all vessels passing, using, or deriving benefit from the light in question; a certain range of distance appears to have been assumed within which the vessel was liable; and although at one lighthouse the oil might be bad, at another the candles unsnuffed, whilst at a third the coal fire would be reeking in its embers, still so long as the light was there the dues were chargeable.
Things came to a crisis at last. In districts where at the time when the king’s good-humour had been availed of vessels from fishing-village to fishing-village crept round by twos and threes, the waters got crowded daily and hourly with ships of mighty tonnage, and every ton had to pay. It was difficult to tell what the recipients of the royal benevolence were making; but from the style in which their mere collectors throve, it was evidently something far too good to be talked about. It must have been very hard to have been insulted with an offer of three hundred and fifty thousand pounds for a barren rock in the ocean, nothing like that number of feet square, subjecting the proprietor to the necessity of making a pathetic rejoinder to the effect “that if he must sell, it must be for five hundred and fifty thousand pounds, and that would not pay him;” but a jury was appealed to, and four hundred and forty-five thousand pounds was carried off as the vested right in one lighthouse, with a heavy sigh that it was so little. Another leviathan of the deep realized three hundred thousand pounds; and if these were whales among the tritons, the tritons and the minnows too, all plethoric of their kind, fared well. The scale was freighted heavily with compulsory purchase-money before they were all bought out, and the shipping interest had to pay surplus light dues for many years before the official custodians of the lighthouse fund had got quit of their huge debt.
Even on these terms it was the right thing to do. When the lighthouse on the Smalls rock in the Bristol Channel was in private hands, the annual consumption of oil, which is another way of stating the annual amount of light produced, was as little as two hundred gallons; at this present time fifteen hundred gallons are burnt within the year. The dues payable in those days were twopence per ton, whilst now vessels pay at the rate of one halfpenny per ton over-sea, and one-sixteenth part of a penny per ton for coasting voyages, less an abatement in the latter cases of thirty-five per cent. But bad lighting, private proprietorship, public debt, and, to a great extent, even surplus light dues, have gone for ever, and lighthouses have got back to what Queen Elizabeth meant them to be—public trusts in public hands for public uses.
And yet it was private enterprise that built and rebuilt, and again rebuilt the Eddystone, and it was private courage that established that which will soon be a thing of the past, the strange wooden-legged Malay-looking barracoon of a lighthouse in the Bristol Channel, on a rock called the “Smalls.”
The wooden structure at the Smalls was conceived originally by a Mr. Phillips, of Liverpool, a member of the Society of Friends. He set himself to establish “a great holy good to serve and save humanity,” and even in this world he had his reward; for sixty years afterwards, when his representatives had to surrender it to the Trinity House, they got one hundred and seventy thousand pounds by way of compensation for it.
Like most sagacious men, he knew how to choose his instruments. At that time there resided in Liverpool a young man of the name of Whiteside, a maker of “violins, spinettes, and upright harpsichords,” with a strongly marked mechanical genius.
In the summer of 1772, this young fiddle-maker found himself at Solva, twenty miles from the rock, with a gang of Cornish miners, who were to quarry sockets into the stone, into which it was originally intended that iron pillars should be soldered. The first essay was sufficiently appalling. The surface of the rock is called twelve feet above the level of high water, that is, in smooth weather; but in tempestuous seas, and when the waves are rolling in from the south-west, it is as many feet below it. The party had landed from their cutter, and had got a long iron rod worked a few feet into the rock, when the weather suddenly got “dirty.” The wind and the sea rose together, and the cutter had to sheer off lest she should be wrecked. The men on the rock clung, as best they might, to the half-fastened shaft, and a desperate struggle ensued between brute nature and that passive fortitude which is greater than brute nature,—all through the night into the morning, all through the day into the night again, until the third day, when the storm abated and they were saved.
Nothing daunted, it was agreed that it was just as well to know the worst. One hint was immediately taken, and rings and holding bars were let into various parts of the rock, to which the men could lash themselves and each other on similar occasions. It was soon found that iron pillars would not do, that they were not sufficiently elastic; and great pains were taken to find heart of oak that would be equal to resist the angry forces of the waters. That the present structure would stand for ever, may be doubted, except by a process analogous to the repair of the Irishman’s stocking,—first a new foot, and then a fresh leg. Anyhow, it has been recently thought better to build a granite tower, which, once well done, may be said, humanly speaking, to be done for ever. The light will be exhibited at a greater elevation, which gives it an extended range, and the size of the lantern will admit of a larger and more powerful apparatus. The mode of procedure is of course very different from that adopted by Mr. Whiteside. Where formerly there was a poor fiddle-maker, with half-a-dozen Cornish miners, and a ship’s carpenter or two, there is now a civil engineer, a clerk, thirty-eight granite masons, four carpenters, eight smiths, thirteen seamen, four bargemen, two miners and eight labourers; a commodious wharf, a steam vessel, a tender, and some barges. There may be nothing so pathetic or so heroic as that long cling of nine forlorn human creatures round the first iron bar; it would be shame to the engineer if it should be so; but there is real work to do, and it is being thoroughly well done.
The story of the present structure at the Eddystone has been told with quaint simplicity by the man who raised it. Smeaton had this advantage over Whiteside, that he had precursors in his work: but then the work was harder, and was done more enduringly. Whiteside’s work at the Smalls is coming away in the course of a season or two; Smeaton’s, at the Eddystone, is to remain the pattern lighthouse of the world for ever. The first Eddystone, built in 1696, was a strange affair—something like a Chinese pagoda, or a belvedere in some suburban tea-gardens, with open galleries and projecting cranes. The architect was Henry Winstanley, and he has depicted himself complacently fishing out of his kitchen window; but how he ever expected his queer mansion to stand the winter storms is simply a marvel. It was completed in 1699, and it was destroyed in 1703. The necessity for repairs had taken him to the rock at the time, a dreadful storm set in on the 26th November, and the next morning there was nothing left of the lighthouse or its occupants but some of the large irons whereby the work had been fixed in the rock. A narrative of the occurrence, printed in the following year, states:—“It was very remarkable that, as we are informed, at the same time the lighthouse abovesaid was blown down, the model of it, in Mr. Winstanley’s house at Littlebury, in Essex, above 200 miles from the lighthouse, fell down and was broke to pieces.” Upon which, Smeaton shrewdly remarks: “This, however, may not appear extraordinary, if we consider, that the same general wind that blew down the lighthouse near Plymouth might blow down the model at Littlebury.”
The next structure at the Eddystone, commenced in 1706, was a very different thing. Mr. John Rudyerd was doomed by fortune to be a silk mercer, and keep a shop on Ludgate Hill; but Nature had made him an engineer. Smeaton speaks with great admiration of many of his arrangements; and if the lighthouse had not been destroyed by fire, about forty-six years after its erection, there appears no reason why it should not have been standing to this day. While Winstanley’s was all external ornament, with numberless nooks and angles for the wind and sea to gripe it by, Rudyerd’s was a snug, smooth, solid cone, round which the sea might rage, but on which it could hardly fasten. But fire conquered what the water could not. Luckily for the keepers, it broke out in the very top of the lantern, and burnt downwards, and there was time to save the men, although one of them, looking upwards at the burning mass, not only got burnt on the shoulders and head with some molten lead, but while gazing upwards with his mouth open, received some of the liquid metal down his throat, and yet survived, to the incredulity of all Plymouth, for twelve days, when seven ounces of lead, “of a flat, oval form,” was taken from his stomach.
The lessees of the Eddystone, in those days, seem to have been liberal-minded people. The tolls ceased with the extinction of the light, and could not be renewed until it was again exhibited. It was their apparent interest, therefore, to get a structure run up on the old model as quickly as possible. It was true it had been destroyed by fire, but a little modification of the old arrangements would probably have prevented such a calamity recurring, and it had proved itself stable and seaworthy. Nevertheless, they not only consulted the ablest engineer of the day, but submitted to the delay and extra cost involved in the adoption of his advice to build of stone and granite.
The point of most enduring interest connected with the present Eddystone is the peculiarity of its form, which is familiar, probably, to everybody in the kingdom, from the child, who has seen it in a magic-lantern, to the civil engineer who knows Smeaton’s stately folio by heart. Until he built so, the form was almost unknown to us; and since he built so, all the ocean lighthouses have been modifications of it. It is interesting to contrast the reasoning of Mr. Alan Stevenson, the builder of the “Skerryvore,” another of these deep-sea lamp-posts, as they have been called, off the western coast of Scotland,—with the instincts of Smeaton, so to speak, on the same subject. It may not be very edifying to the general reader to learn “that, as the stability of a sea-tower depends, cæteris paribus, on the lowness of its centre of gravity, the general notion of its form is that of a cone; but that, as the forces to which its several horizontal sections are opposed decrease towards its top in a rapid ratio, the solid should be generated by the revolution of some curve line convex to the axis of the tower, and gradually approaching to parallelism with it; and that this, in fact, is a general description of the Eddystone Tower, devised by Smeaton.” Neither is it a thing likely to be remembered, without saying it over a good many times to oneself, that “the shaft of the Skerryvore pillar is a solid, generated by the revolution of a rectangular hyperbola about its asymptote as a vertical axis.” But if we understand the respective narratives of the constructors rightly, Smeaton worked from analogy, and Stevenson from mathematical calculation. Smeaton tells us of his desire to make his lighthouse resemble the trunk of a stately tree, and he gives drawings both of a trunk and of a branch, to show how they start, the one from the ground, and the other from the main stem. He is also constantly recurring to the idea of the elasticity of stone, and he quotes a report from one of the keepers, that on one occasion “the house did shake as if a man had been up in a great tree.” Certainly, the effect to the eye in looking at the Eddystone, corroborates the conception with which his mind was evidently possessed; it emerges from the sea; the curve of the natural rock is continued in a singularly felicitous manner; the Skerryvore is a fine shaft, but one sees that it has been stuck in a hole, thoroughly well fastened in, and (relying on its weight and coherence) likely to remain there till doomsday; but the Eddystone is homogeneous to the rock, as well as to itself; and gazing on it, one gets into the same train of contemplation as Topsy did upon her wickedness, and supposes it grew there. Nevertheless the Skerryvore is a noble structure, and the memoir of its construction by Mr. Stevenson is almost exhaustive of all that is at present known about lighthouses and lighthouse illumination.
And if these be the lighthouses, and the mode of life among those by whom they are builded, let us try to realize the daily work of those by whom the structures are inhabited. “You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.” That is the first article of instructions to light-keepers, as may be seen by any visitors to a station. Whatever else happens, you are to do that. It may be you are isolated, through the long night-watches, twenty miles from land, fifty or a hundred feet above the level of the sea, with the winds and waves howling round you, and the sea-birds dashing themselves to death against the gleaming lantern, like giant-moths against a candle; or it may be a calm, voluptuous, moonlight night, the soft landairs laden with the perfumes of the highland heather or the Cornish gorse, tempting you to keep your watch outside the lantern, in the open gallery, instead of in your watch-room chair within; the Channel may be full of stately ships, each guided by your light, or the horizon may be bare of all sign of life, except, remote and far beneath you, the lantern of some fishing-boat at sea,—but, whatever may be going on outside, there is within for you the duty, simple and easy, by virtue of your moral method and orderly training, “to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.” You shall be helped to do this easily and well by abundant discipline, first, on probation, at head-quarters, where you shall gain familiarity with all your materials—lamps, oil, wicks, lighting apparatus, revolving machinery, and cleaning stores; you shall be looked at, and over, and through, by keen medical eyes, before you can be admitted to this service, lest, under the exceptional nature of your future life, you, not being a sound man, should break down, to the public detriment and your own; you shall be enjoined “to the constant habit of cleanliness and good order in your own person, and to the invariable exercise of temperance and morality in your habits and proceedings, so that, by your example, you may enforce, as far as lies in your power, the observance of the same laudable conduct by your wife and family.” You shall be well paid while you are hale and active, and well pensioned when you are past work; you shall be ennobled, by compulsion, into provident consideration for your helpmate and your children by an insurance on your life; but when all this is done for you, and the highest and completest satisfaction that can fall to the best of us on this side the grave—the sense of being useful to our fellows—is ordered for you in abundant measure, it all recurs to what, as regards the specialty of your life, is the be-all and the end-all of your existence, and this is the burden to the ballad of your story:—“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising.”
To do this implies a perpetual watch. “He whose watch is about to end is to trim the lamps and leave them burning in perfect order before he quits the lantern and calls the succeeding watch, and he who has the watch at sun-rise, when he has extinguished the lamps, is to commence all necessary preparations for the exhibition of the light at the ensuing sunset;” and, moreover, “no bed, sofa, or other article on which to recline, can be permitted, either in the lantern, or in the apartment under the lantern, known as the watch-room.”
Thus far we have a common denominator to the life of every light-keeper; but in other respects it varies much. At such stations as the Forelands or Harwich, where there are gardens to cultivate and plenty of land room for the men to stretch their legs and renovate themselves after the night watches; where visitors from neighbouring watering-places are constantly coming and going, to talk, to praise, to listen, and, perhaps, to fee, it is all very well; but there are also places “remote, unfriended, melancholy, slow,” where the walk is limited to the circle of the gallery-railing, or the diameter of the lighthouse column; where the only incidents are the inspections of the committee, the visits of the district superintendent, or the monthly relief which takes the men back to shore. At these stations, when the sea is making fun of them, it sweeps up clean over the roof, and makes the lantern-glasses ring again, and in calmer weather the men may creep carefully out upon the rock to solace themselves with a little fishing; or if of more nervous temperament, may do it, as Winstanley did, with greater security from the kitchen window.
Not but what some people like that sort of life. Smeaton tells a story of a shoemaker who went out as light-keeper to the Eddystone because he did not like confinement, having found himself in effect a greater prisoner at his lapstone than he would be at the rock; but then Smeaton confesses a few pages farther on that at times the keepers have been so short of provisions as to be compelled to eat the candles.
In the old days of private proprietorship, when every owner had his system of management, and when the desire to make a profit set the aims of efficiency and economy into antagonism, exceptional cases of very terrible tragic significance occasionally occurred. For instance, here is a letter from the heroic fiddle-maker himself, dated “Smalls, 1st February, 1777,” written in triplicate, put into a corked bottle, and that into a cask inscribed, “Open this, and you will find a letter:”—
“To Mr. Williams.
“Smalls, February 1st, 1777.
“Sir,—Being now in a most dangerous and distressed condition upon the Smalls, do hereby trust Providence will bring to your hand this, which prayeth for your immediate assistance to fetch us off the Smalls before the next spring, or we fear we shall perish; our water near all gone, our fire quite gone, and our house in a most melancholy manner. I doubt not but you will fetch us from here as fast as possible; we can be got off at some part of the tide almost any weather. I need say no more, but remain your distressed,
“Humble servant,
“Hy. Whiteside.
“We were distressed in a gale of wind upon the 13th of January, since which have not been able to keep any light; but we could not have kept any light above sixteen nights longer for want of oil and candles, which make us murmur and think we are forgotten.
“Ed. Edwardes.
“Geo. Adams.
“Jno. Price.
“We doubt not but that whoever takes up this will be so merciful as to cause it to be sent to Thos. Williams, Esq., Trelethin, near St. David’s, Wales.”
Again, a quarter of a century later, the watch was kept by two keepers; and for four months the weather shut them off from all communication with the land. The method of talking by signals was not developed anywhere into the complete system it has now become, and does not appear to have been in use at all among the lighthouse people; but in the course of a week or two after the storm had set in, it was rumoured at several of the western ports that something was wrong at the Smalls. Passing vessels reported that a signal of distress was out, but that was all they knew. Many attempts to approach the rock were made, but fruitlessly. The boats could not get near enough to hail, they could only return to make the bewildered agent and the anxious relatives of the keepers more bewildered and more anxious by the statement that there was always what seemed to be the dim figure of a man in one corner of the outside gallery, but whether he spoke or moved, or not, they could not tell. Night after night the light was watched for with great misgiving whether it would ever show again. But the light failed not. Punctually as the sun set it seemed to leave a fragment of its fire gleaming in the lantern glasses, which burnt there till it rose again, showing this much at least, that some one was alive at the Smalls; but whether both the men, or which, no anxious mother or loving wife could tell. Four months of this, and then, in calmer weather, a Milford boat brought into the agency at Solva one light-keeper and one dead man.
What the living man had suffered can never now be known. Whether, when first he came distinctly to believe his comrade would die he stood in blank despair, or whether he implored him on his knees, in an agony of selfish terror, to live; whether when, perhaps for the first time in his life, he stood face to face, and so very close, to death, he thought of immediate burial, or whether he rushed at once to the gallery to shout out to the nearest sail, perhaps a mile away;—at what exact moment it was that the thought flashed across him that he must not bury the body in the sea, lest those on shore should question him as Cain was questioned for his brother, and he, failing to produce him, should be branded with Cain’s curse and meet a speedier fate—is unrecorded. What he did was to make a coffin. He had been a cooper by trade, and by breaking up a bulk-head in the living room, he got the dead man covered in; then, with infinite labour he took him to the gallery and lashed him there. Perhaps with an instinctive wisdom he set himself to work, cleaned and re-cleaned his lamps, unpacked and packed his stores. Perhaps he made a point of walking resolutely up to the coffin three or four times a day, perhaps he never went near it, and even managed to look over it rather than at it, when he was scanning the whole horizon for a sail. In his desperation it may have occurred to him that as his light was a warning to keep vessels off, so its absence would speedily betray some ship to a dangerous vicinity to his forlornness, whose crew would be companions to him even though he had caused them to be wrecked. But this he did not do. No lives were risked to alleviate his desolation, but when he came on shore with his dead companion he was a sad, reserved, emaciated man, so strangely worn that his associates did not know him.
The immediate result of this sad occurrence was, that three men were always kept at the lighthouse, and this wise rule pertains in the public service.
Among the minor miseries of life at the Smalls would be such things as a storm, in which the central flooring was entirely displaced, the stove thrown from its position “into the boiling surf below, and the time-piece hurled into a sleeping berth opposite the place it usually hung.”
Midway between a rock lighthouse and a shore station, both as to structure and as to the experiences of life in it, is that mongrel breed amongst edifices, the Pile Lighthouse. There are many sands at the mouths of tidal rivers where the water is not deep enough, nor are the channels sufficiently wide to make a light-vessel suitable, and which yet need marking, and marking, too, at a spot where not only the ordinary foundations of masonry, but even the pile foundations used for many purposes, would be at fault. Here it is that two very ingenious plans have been of service. The one is to fit the lower extremity of piles with broad-flanged screws, something like the screw of a steam-vessel, and then setting them upright in the sand, screw them down with capstans worked from the decks of dumb lighters. These bottom piles once secured, the spider legs are bolted on to them, and the spider bodies on the top; a ladder draws up, and a boat swings ready to be lowered. The other mode of meeting the difficulty of mud or loose silt and sand, is by hollow cylinders, which, placed upright on the sand, have the air exhausted from the inside of them, and on the principle that nature abhors a vacuum (at all events in cylinders), the weight of the atmosphere on the sand outside forces it up into the exhausted receiver, and the pile sinks at a rate which, until one gets accustomed to it, is rather surprising. Here, as in the screw pile, the foundation once established, the superstructure, whether of straight shafts or spider legs, is only a matter of detail.
These, then, be the variations of lighthouse structure: rock lighthouses, solitary giants rising from the ocean deeps; pile lighthouses, stuck about the shallow estuaries on long red legs, like so many flamingoes fishing; safer, but with less of dignity and more of ague;—and lastly, the real bonâ fide shore lighthouse, with its broad sweep of down, its neat cottages, and trim inclosures. If my Lord Grenville had had any thought of occupying the residence that he calculated to eliminate from the king’s good-humour, we take it there is very little doubt on which class in the foregoing category he would have fixed his choice.
The remaining contribution to the complement of the lighting service is the light-vessel. There are, unfortunately, too many outlying dangers on our coasts where it is either impossible to fix a lighthouse, or where, from the shifting character of the shoal, it is necessary to move the light from time to time. Of these the most notable are the Goodwin Sands. There are constantly propositions for lighthouses on the Goodwin; and some men, mortified that dry lands once belonging to the men of Kent should be water-wastes for ever, have proposed boldly to reclaim them, believing that the scheme would pay, not merely by the acreage added to the county, but by the buried treasures to be exhumed. At present they are marked with three light-vessels, one at each end and one in the middle. There are other floating stations still farther remote from land; and at one—the Seven Stones, between the Scilly Islands and the main—the vessel is in forty fathoms water. These light-ships ride by chains of a peculiarly prepared and toughened iron; and in heavy weather the strain on the moorings is relieved by paying out fathom after fathom, until sometimes the whole cable (at the Seven Stones, 315 fathoms) is in the water. These vessels, of course, are manned by sailors, and the discipline is that of shipboard; but here, as on shore, the burden of the main story meets us at the first clause of the instructions—“You are to light the lamps every evening at sun-setting, and keep them constantly burning, bright and clear, till sun-rising,” unless you break adrift, and then, if you have shifted your position before you could bring up with your spare anchor, you are to put them out and wait till you can be replaced.
Among the curiosities of lighthouse experience are these two. The one that it is an occupation in which the modern claim for feminine participation has been forestalled. There is at this moment a woman light-keeper, and as she retains her employment it may be inferred that she does her duty properly. The other is an odd fact, namely, that so far back as the last century the rationale of the cod-liver oil fashion was foreshadowed at the “Smalls.” As in the wool-combing districts of Yorkshire, where the wool is dressed with oil, consumption and strumous affections of the like character are rare, so it is said that people going out to the “Smalls” as keepers, thin, hectic and emaciated, have returned plump, jocund, and robust, on account of living in an unctuous atmosphere, where every breath was laden with whale oil, and every meal might be enriched with fish.
The French, from economical reasons, early gave their attention to the use of seed oils, and the first developments of the moderator lamp of the drawing-room are exclusively French. There were many difficulties in the way of applying it to lighthouses until it had been greatly simplified, because the fact of the carcel lamp being a somewhat complicated piece of machinery was against its use in places where, if anything went wrong, it might be a month or two before the weather would admit of the light-keepers being relieved, and give them an opportunity of exchanging old lamps for new. The thing was done at last by a simple but very beautiful adjustment of the argand reservoir, under which the prime condition for all good combustion was attained, namely, that the oil just about to be burnt, should be rarefied and prepared for burning by the action of the heat of that which is at the moment being consumed. And so great is the quantity of oil used in the three kingdoms, that this change from sperm to rapeseed oil must have made a saving of many thousands a year.
But if oil from its portability and comparative simplicity has become the standard material for light in lighthouses, and has been the object of a thousand and one nice adaptations in regard to its preparation and the machinery by which it is consumed, the attention of very able men has been given to other sources of illumination.
One of these was known as the Bude light, and consisted of jets of oxygen introduced into the centre of oil wicks, producing an intense combustion, which turned steel wire into fireworks, but requiring great management to avoid smoking and charring. It was finally regarded as unsuitable on account of the manufacture of the gas and its niceties of chemical manipulation.
The Lime lights, of which there are several, are substantially the same in this, that oxygen and hydrogen gases have to be made (in the vicinity of gas-works, the common gas will do for the hydrogen) and are burnt together upon lime or some analogous preparation; and there is a magnificent adaptation of the Electric light at this moment at the South Foreland.
The first electric lights were galvanic. The light, developed between carbon points, was generated by a galvanic battery. Flickering, intermittent, and uncertain, the light was yet sufficiently astonishing, and when it came to be discovered that the residuum from the decomposition was valuable for making costly colours, “The Electric Power Light and Colour Company” offered to sell the mere light at a very low rate; but the difficulties in the way were insuperable, the manipulation of the batteries was somewhat nice and markedly unhealthy, the flickering was objectionable, and the light, though intense, was so extremely minute that the shadows of the framework of the lantern-glasses widened outwards in a way that would have covered the horizon seaward with broad bands of dark.
But the matter was not to stop here. In 1831 it had been discovered by Faraday that when a piece of soft iron surrounded by a metallic wire was passed by the poles of a magnet, an electric current was produced in the wire, which could be exalted so as to give a spark; and upon this hint an apparatus has been constructed, consisting of an accumulation of powerful magnets and iron cores with surrounding coils. This apparatus, driven by steam-engines, and fitted with a subtle ingenuity of resource always tending to simplicity that seems a marked feature in the mind of the patentee, is, as we have said, at this moment at work, and very glorious it is to the eye of the observer; a piece of sunlight poured out upon the night.
The chief point to be determined is its power over fogs. That any light will penetrate through some fogs is out of the question. The Sun himself can’t do it. But the artificial light that can hold out longest and pierce the farthest is clearly the light at all costs for the turning points in the great ocean highways.
A success of this kind would create something of a revolution in a branch of lighthouse art on which a vast amount of ingenuity and even genius has been expended; that is, the apparatus by which the light should be exhibited. There may be divisions among scientific men as to the abstract nature and action of light, but sufficient of its secondary laws are known to make various arrangements in regard to the management of a generated light most valuable.
The old plan known in scientific nomenclature as the Catoptric system is by reflection.
Take a bowl of copper, something like a wash-hand basin, and having shaped it carefully into a parabolic curve, and then silvered and polished the interior, set it up on its side and introduce an argand lamp into it, so that the flame of the lamp shall be in true focus, and we have a reflecting apparatus. These may be multiplied in double and triple rows, and may be either placed upon flat faces, or curved to the circle, but a lamp in the centre of a reflector is the basis of the arrangement.
If a light were put upon a rock in the ocean without a reflector, it would be seen dimly, but all round. Dimly, because the light, spreading in all directions, would be weak and diluted, but visible all round because there would be nothing to obstruct it. But put this light into a twenty-one inch reflector, and we have two distinct consequences;—one that we obstruct the radiation of all the rays except those that escape from the mouth of the reflector; the other, that we reflect into the same direction as the rays that are escaping all those we have obstructed from their natural radiation.
A twenty-one inch reflector allows the rays issuing from it to diverge fifteen degrees. So that we have the light of the 360 degrees (the whole of the circle) gathered into fifteen (a twenty-fourth part of the circle). It does not quite follow that within that area the light will be twenty-four times as strong as if allowed to dissipate itself all round, because something must be allowed for absorption and waste; but we believe this allowance has been greatly overstated, and that where there are no mechanical difficulties in the way, the reflecting system is decidedly the best. Of course where it is necessary to light more than fifteen degrees of the circle, it will be necessary to use more reflectors, placing them side by side round a shaft, and if these are set into revolving motion, focus after focus of each reflector comes before the eye of the mariner, and the effect is all that can be desired.
The dioptric or refracting system of lighting is the reverse of this. In the reflector the light is caught into a basin and thrown out again. In the refracting system, in its passage through the glass prisms, it is bent up or down and falls full upon the eye of the mariner, instead of wasting itself among the stars or down among the rocks at the lighthouse foot. For light, falling upon glass at a certain angle, does not go straight on, but gets deflected and transmitted in an altered line, as it does through water. And here comes the weakness of the dioptric system, in close vicinity to its strength. It is true that prisms and lenses send the light in the direction which is desired, but they charge a toll for the transmission; the glass is thick, and somewhat of the nature of a sponge. If we write on blotting-paper the marks appear on the other side, but some of the ink has soaked sideways, and there is very little doubt, that when light is transmitted through glass, a good deal of it is absorbed and retained.
To those who have never seen a dioptric apparatus, or a diagram of one, it would be very difficult to make any written description intelligible. The reader must imagine a central lamp, with three or four circular wicks, making up a core of light four inches across, and as many high. Round this, and on a level with it, at a distance of three feet from it, go belts of glass. From these belts, or panels, the light goes straight out to sea, but as there is a great quantity of light which goes up to the ceiling and down to the floor, rings of prisms are put above and below the main panels, and these catch the upper and lower light, and bend it out to sea, parallel to the main central beam. When a revolving light has to be made by the dioptric apparatus, the lenses are so constructed that the light, in going through them, is gathered up into the exact similitude of a ray, as it would leave the mouth of a reflector, and of course with the same result; the central lamp remains stationary, and the lenses move round it, and focus after focus, flash after flash, come upon the eye of the mariner. Both the systems admit of peculiar adaptations, and they have been occasionally combined into a hybrid apparatus, called Cata-dioptric.
This, then, is, in brief, the history of the development of the lighthouse system of the United Kingdom. We think it has fairly kept pace with the development of the mercantile marine. When there were coal fires at some lighthouses, and wax candles at others, the vessels that passed them, and were guided by them, were not such as modern shipwrights would look at with much complacency. But the age that has produced the Great Eastern can also point to the Skerryvore and the Bishop Rock lighthouses, to the Electric light, and to a first-class Lighting apparatus.
Whatever the future in store for the English lighthouse system, one thing is certain, that it cannot, and was never meant to supersede seamanship. No amount of lighting will dispense with the necessity for eyes, no extent of warning is so good as the capacity for grappling with a danger. The lighthouse authorities may cheer a sailor on his way with leading lights and beacon warnings, but he must still be a sailor to turn their warnings to account.
When Rudyerd’s Eddystone was building, Louis XIV. was at war with England, and a French privateer took the men at work upon the rock, and carried them to a French prison. When that monarch heard of it, he immediately ordered them to be released, and the captors to be put in their place; declaring that, though at enmity with England, he was not at war with mankind. Extremes meet. The most gorgeous monarch in Europe and the plain Quaker of Liverpool had one point in common;—they both agreed that the erection of a Lighthouse was “a great holy good, to serve and save humanity.”
BESSY’S SPECTACLES.