The Boyhood of Great Inventors

by A. Fraser Robertson

But in spite of its long standing there was a hidden flaw in the lighthouse. It was inflammable—capable of catching fire. One day—no one could quite tell how it happened, it might be the flame had dried and scorched the timber. At any rate, a man going in to snuff the candles found that fire had broken out. It wanted but a few minutes till the place was in flames. The men rushed below, while a perfect rain of beams and burning lead fell in showers about their heads. Seeing the blaze from the shore a boat put off with all speed. When it reached the rock it found the men, not on the rock, but crouching beneath a ledge, dripping and half dead, and with just enough life in them to enable them to catch the rope thrown to them, for it was too rough for the boat to reach the rock. And so they were towed on board.

And now the third attempt at the lighthouse was to be made by John Smeaton.

“Thou art the man to do it,” were the words of the letter asking him to undertake the work. And so Smeaton was launched on that which was to make his name famous.

The first step he took was to get and study the plans of the former men. To succeed he had first to find out where the others had failed.

The first building had failed in weight. The second had not been fire-proof. And so he decided to make his lighthouse of stone. People when they heard of it called out that it was a wild project. It could not be done. “Nothing but wood could possibly stand on the Eddystone.” But Smeaton was in no way moved or cast down. What he made he wanted to stand, and not to last for a few years merely; and so of stone he determined it should be.

He began to draw out the design. He kept to the shape of Rudyerd’s—the long cone-like column. He made the diameter of the foundation broader. He planned the locking and bonding and dovetailing of the stones—each to each, and all to the centre. When this was all carefully thought and made out he started from London for Plymouth. He was six days on the journey owing to the “badness of the roads.”

On the 2nd of April he set sail for the rock, but winds and waves beat so vehemently that he found it impossible to land. All he could do was to view the low, treacherous black thing on which he was to build his house of stone. Back he went three days later, and for the first time he stood on Eddystone, but only for a couple of hours. There was almost nothing to be seen, only one or two iron branches left from the wrecks of the former wooden buildings. On the third attempt he made he could not even see the rock. Spray and foam hid it entirely from view. In the same way his fourth and fifth visits failed, but his sixth was successful, and he landed at low water, and in the stillness of the evening made his first measurements.

“I went on with my business till nine in the evening,” he wrote, “having worked an hour by candlelight.”

Again and again he tried to get a landing. Sometimes he managed it, at others it was impossible. After having spent fifteen hours in all on the rock he went back to London, and with his own expert hands made a model. The work took him two months in all, and that proficiency that he had learned as a boy in his little workshop at Austhorpe stood him in good stead now. After this he set out for Plymouth again. No detail of his work was too small for him to attend to himself. He visited the quarries where the stones were to be hewn. He carefully chose the kind of cement that was to bind them together; the workmen, the work-yards, the ships that were to carry the stones to the rock. Each and all passed under his eye.

It was a great day when, in August, 1756, he and his men started for Eddystone, and the master fixed the centre and laid down the lines. Now the work might be said to be fairly begun. But was ever work so often broken in upon? Winds and waves are not to be counted on—least of all about the stormy Eddystone, for often though the water is calm and smooth in other places, it smothers in foam the low black reef.