49 Fun Facts About Lighthouses

The most famous lighthouse of antiquity, one of the Seven Wonders, stood at which city?

Alexandria's Pharos stood over 100 metres tall, and its name outlived it: a lighthouse is still a phare in French and a faro in Spanish and Italian.

What did a 15th-century sultan build on the foundations of the fallen Pharos lighthouse, reusing its stones?

A fortress, the Citadel of Qaitbay, still guards the harbour there, and divers have mapped hundreds of huge stone blocks on the seabed around it, some believed to be the lighthouse's own.

The Tower of Hercules, a Roman lighthouse still working after some 1,900 years, stands in which country?

Spain's Tower of Hercules, at A Coruña, has guided ships since Roman times; an 18th-century restoration added the top storeys, so the Roman tower now forms the core.

Who were the first keepers of Hook Head, Ireland's 800-year-old lighthouse, tending its fire for some four centuries?

Monks were the obvious keepers: tradition says a monk named Dubhán kept a beacon on the headland from the 5th century, long before the tower, and his successors tended its fire until the mid-1600s.

Estonia's Kõpu lighthouse, in use since 1531, was built at the demand of which Baltic power, tired of losing ships?

The Hanseatic League's merchants kept losing ships on a shoal beside the Baltic's busiest east-west route, so they pressed for a tower on the island's highest hill.

Henry Winstanley's Eddystone tower of 1698 was the world's first lighthouse to be what?

Fully exposed to the open sea, the wooden tower was a wartime job: a French privateer carried Winstanley off mid-build, and Louis XIV freed him, saying France was at war with England, not humanity.

What happened to Henry Winstanley when the Great Storm of 1703 struck the Eddystone?

He was killed on the lighthouse, having gone out to make repairs; by morning the tower had been swept away, and no trace of it or the men inside was ever found.

John Smeaton modelled the shape of his 1759 Eddystone lighthouse on what?

An oak tree, broad at the base and tapering upward, was his model for standing firm against the waves; while planning it he also worked out how to make lime mortar that sets under water.

Where can the upper part of Smeaton's Eddystone tower be seen today?

Plymouth Hoe got the top half, rebuilt as a monument after cracks in the rock beneath forced a new tower in 1882; the stump still stands out on the reef beside its replacement.

The Bell Rock Lighthouse, the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse, is off which country?

Scotland's Bell Rock tower stands on a reef that is dry only at low water and lies under some 16 feet of sea at high tide, yet its stonework has needed no replacement since 1810.

According to legend, who fixed a warning bell to the Inchcape reef, only for a pirate to steal it?

An abbot hung the bell, the legend runs, which is why the reef is better known as Bell Rock; in Robert Southey's poem the thief is later wrecked there himself.

Which family of engineers designed most of Scotland's lighthouses over a span of 150 years?

The Stevensons kept the work in the family for generations; the son who refused the trade, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote Treasure Island instead.

Whose uncle was a keeper of the Lanterna, the medieval lighthouse of Genoa, in 1449?

Christopher Columbus's uncle Antonio is listed as keeper that year; decades later Genoese guns aimed at French occupiers wrecked the old tower, which is why today's dates from the 1540s.

What made Swiss inventor Aimé Argand's 1780s oil lamp burn so much brighter than earlier lamps?

A hollow wick let air reach the inside of the flame as well as the outside, and a glass chimney pulled the draught, so the oil burned far more completely.

Which French physicist developed the multi-part lens that bears his name for lighthouses?

Augustin-Jean Fresnel ringed a central bull's-eye with stepped glass prisms, because a solid lens that size would be impossibly thick and heavy; he died of tuberculosis at just 39.

A Roman lighthouse some 1,900 years old still stands inside the grounds of which English castle?

Dover Castle's Roman pharos once guided ships across the Channel, and the Saxons later reused it as the bell tower of the church beside it.

Which country's oldest lighthouse, the 'Patriarch of Lighthouses', was completed in 1611 at the Gironde's mouth?

France's kings built it as a show of power, so the tower holds a royal apartment and a chapel; the rocky islet beneath it now disappears under the sea at high tide.

Which Outer Banks lighthouse, striped like a barber pole, is the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States?

Cape Hatteras stands nearly 200 feet tall so its light can reach ships beyond Diamond Shoals, sandbars deadly enough to earn the coast the name Graveyard of the Atlantic.

Minot's Ledge Light off Massachusetts flashes in a 1-4-3 pattern, which has earned it what nickname?

The I Love You Light was given its 1-4-3 flash in 1894 simply to tell it apart; people ashore noticed the count matched the letters in the phrase.

A lighthouse's distinctive paint scheme, such as a barber-pole spiral, serves sailors as what?

A daymark lets sailors tell one tower from its neighbours by day, just as each light's own flash pattern does after dark; lighthouse boards assigned every station both.

Which was the first lighthouse built in what is now the United States, first lit in 1716?

Boston Light first shone in 1716; when its first keeper drowned two years later, a 12-year-old Benjamin Franklin hawked a ballad about it in the streets. The British blew the tower up as they left in 1776.

Which lighthouse, paid for by a colonial lottery and lit in 1764, is the oldest still working in the United States?

Sandy Hook, New Jersey, got its tower from a lottery New York held after merchants petitioned over lost cargoes. Built 500 feet from the tip, it now stands a mile and a half inland, because the sand kept growing.

Which president is credited with directing the building of Maine's Portland Head Light?

George Washington's new federal government had just taken charge of every American lighthouse; Congress voted $1,500 in 1790 to finish the stalled tower, making it the first the United States completed.

Which Union general spent the 1850s building lighthouses in Florida and New Jersey before winning at Gettysburg?

George Meade was an army engineer long before he was a field commander, raising lights on the Florida reefs and the New Jersey shore; he was handed the Union's main army just three days before Gettysburg.

Which Red Sea light has a credible claim to be the world's tallest lighthouse?

Jeddah Light shines from the top of a harbour control tower about 130 metres high, far above the 106-metre Yokohama tower long billed as the tallest lighthouse.

Split Rock Lighthouse in Minnesota was built after a 1905 storm damaged or sank 29 ships on which lake?

Superior's Mataafa Storm damaged 29 ships in November 1905, and shipowners demanded a light. No road reached the cliff until 1924, so every load of building material came by boat and was hoisted up the rock face.

Before electric motors, what kept a lighthouse's heavy rotating lens turning all night?

A weight-driven clockwork did the job: a column of weights sank slowly down the middle of the tower, and a keeper had to crank it back up by hand every couple of hours until dawn.

In 1900 all three keepers of the Flannan Isles lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides vanished; what did the official inquiry blame?

A giant wave, the inquiry concluded: the men had gone down to secure gear at the landing stage when an unexpected roller swept them away. The relief ship found only stopped clocks and an empty station.

Which English novelist wrote To the Lighthouse, a 1927 classic about a family's long-postponed boat trip?

Virginia Woolf set the novel on the Isle of Skye, yet its beacon is said to be Godrevy in Cornwall, which she could see from the house where her family spent every childhood summer.

A keeper on Wales's lonely Smalls rock kept his dead partner's body instead of burying it at sea; why?

Fear of a murder charge drove him: around 1800 he built a box from the hut's own woodwork, put the body in it and lashed it to the outside rail until the relief boat finally came.

Which lighthouse keeper's daughter became a national heroine in 1838 by rowing through a storm to reach shipwreck survivors?

Grace Darling and her father rowed from the Longstone light in the Farne Islands to nine survivors of the wrecked steamer Forfarshire; intensely shy, she was overwhelmed by the fame and died of tuberculosis four years later.

Brittany's La Jument lighthouse became world famous through what?

A photo of a huge wave engulfing it, shot from a helicopter by Jean Guichard, shows keeper Théodore Malgorn in the doorway; he had come down to look at the helicopter and ducked back inside just in time.

How did Denmark save its Rubjerg Knude Lighthouse from the sea?

It was moved 70 metres inland on rails in October 2019, all 720 tonnes of it, within a few hours; drifting sand had already forced its outbuildings to be abandoned, and the sea was expected to claim the tower within a few years.

The Statue of Liberty spent its first 15 years as an official lighthouse; why did it fail?

Its torch was too dim: the Lighthouse Board tried for years to brighten it, yet the statue stayed all but invisible to ships at night, and in 1901 the Board gladly handed it to the War Department.

The first lighthouse on Scilly's Bishop Rock was an iron tower on legs; what became of it in 1850?

A gale swept it away in February 1850 before it was ever lit, with only the lamp still to fit; its designer had argued that waves would roll harmlessly between the legs. The granite tower that replaced it still stands.

Why is Fastnet Rock, off County Cork, nicknamed 'Ireland's Teardrop'?

It was the emigrants' last sight of home as they sailed for America. A light was built on the rock only after the American packet Stephen Whitney was wrecked nearby in 1847.

Which sister ship of the Titanic rammed and sank the Nantucket lightship in thick fog in 1934?

Olympic, nicknamed 'Old Reliable', struck the anchored lightship in heavy fog off Cape Cod and sank it, killing seven of the eleven crew; the liner was blamed and retired the following year.

Blind Irish engineer Alexander Mitchell invented which kind of lighthouse, made to stand on sand or mud instead of rock?

Screw-pile lighthouses stand on iron legs twisted into the seabed like corkscrews; Mitchell first tried the idea in secret, rowing out with his son to screw a pile into a Belfast Lough sandbank.

Swedish engineer Gustaf Dalén won the 1912 Nobel Prize in Physics for a valve that let lighthouses do what?

Run with no keeper: Dalén's sun valve lit a beacon at dusk and shut it off at dawn, so it could burn unattended for up to a year. An explosion during a gas test cost him his sight in 1912, yet he worked on until 1937.

What powered hundreds of unattended Soviet lighthouses along the Arctic coast?

Radioisotope generators, around a thousand in all, ran Soviet beacons for years on the heat of decaying strontium-90; after the Soviet collapse, scrap-metal hunters broke several of them open.

Which body looks after lighthouses around the coasts of England and Wales?

Trinity House was chartered by Henry VIII in 1514 as a guild of Deptford mariners who wanted to regulate pilots on the Thames; five centuries on, it still keeps the lights and runs a charity for seafarers.

In the United States, lighthouses have been maintained by which service since 1939?

The Coast Guard absorbed the old Lighthouse Service that year, though many civilian keepers stayed on; one of the last, Frank Schubert, looked after New York's Coney Island light until his death in 2003.

Why does Canada still station lighthouse keepers on tiny Machias Seal Island, off Maine?

To uphold a territorial claim: the United States says the island is American too. The light, first lit in 1832, now runs automatically, yet Canada keeps keepers there all year to assert its sovereignty.

San Diego's clifftop Old Point Loma lighthouse was abandoned in 1891 because of what?

Fog and low cloud often hid it: the lamp sat 462 feet above the sea, so after 36 years a new tower was lit much lower down the point. Height, a lighthouse's usual asset, was its flaw.

A ship's pilot lines up two 'range lights', one behind and above the other, to do what?

Stay in a safe channel: if the lower, nearer light slides to one side of the higher one, the pilot steers toward it until the two stack up again. British sailors call the pair leading lights.

What is the glassed-in housing at the top of a lighthouse called?

The lantern room holds the lamp and lens; by day keepers drew curtains around it, because sunlight pouring in through the great lens could be focused enough to start a fire.

British engineer Richard Henry Brunton was hired in 1868 to light the coasts of which country, newly opened to Western trade?

Japan had promised the Western powers by treaty to light its coasts, so the new Meiji government took on Brunton, a young railway engineer; he also started its telegraph system and was received by the emperor.

Which actor played the grizzled old keeper opposite Robert Pattinson in the 2019 film The Lighthouse?

Willem Dafoe plays the tyrannical old keeper in Robert Eggers's film, shot in black and white in a nearly square frame that makes the screen feel as cramped as the tower the two men share.

After its light went out in 1957, Oregon's wave-battered Tillamook Rock lighthouse was refitted in 1980 to store what?

Urns of human ashes: buyers reopened the tower in 1980 as a columbarium called Eternity at Sea, with room, they said, for 300,000 urns, but took in only about 30 before Oregon took away its licence in 1999.