Lighthouses Trivia
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49 free Lighthouses trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Lighthouses have guided sailors for more than two thousand years, and this quiz covers the whole story: the ancient Pharos of Alexandria, the still-working Roman Tower of Hercules, the wave-washed towers of Eddystone and Bell Rock, the Fresnel lens that made a lamp visible from twenty miles, and the keepers, heroines and mysteries that came with the job. Easy questions ask what a keeper's nickname was and which US lighthouse is the tallest; harder ones dig into the 1801 Smalls tragedy, the three keepers who vanished from the Flannan Isles in 1900, the Danish tower rolled 70 metres inland on rails, and why the Statue of Liberty once answered to the Lighthouse Board. It suits coastal-holiday fans, sailors, history buffs and any pub quiz that wants a round with real stories in it. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on lighthouses, individual towers, their engineers and their keepers, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The most famous lighthouse of antiquity, one of the Seven Wonders, stood at which city?
Alexandria
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.
Q 02What did a 15th-century sultan build on the foundations of the fallen Pharos lighthouse, reusing its stones?
A fortress
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.
Q 03The Tower of Hercules, a Roman lighthouse still working after some 1,900 years, stands in which country?
Spain
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.
Q 04Who were the first keepers of Hook Head, Ireland's 800-year-old lighthouse, tending its fire for some four centuries?
Monks
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.
Q 05Estonia's Kõpu lighthouse, in use since 1531, was built at the demand of which Baltic power, tired of losing ships?
The Hanseatic League
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.
Q 06Henry Winstanley's Eddystone tower of 1698 was the world's first lighthouse to be what?
Fully exposed to the open sea
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.
Q 07What happened to Henry Winstanley when the Great Storm of 1703 struck the Eddystone?
He was killed on the lighthouse
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.
Q 08John Smeaton modelled the shape of his 1759 Eddystone lighthouse on what?
An oak tree
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.
Q 09Where can the upper part of Smeaton's Eddystone tower be seen today?
Plymouth Hoe
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.
Q 10The Bell Rock Lighthouse, the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse, is off which country?
Scotland
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.
Q 11According to legend, who fixed a warning bell to the Inchcape reef, only for a pirate to steal it?
An abbot
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.
Q 12Which family of engineers designed most of Scotland's lighthouses over a span of 150 years?
The Stevensons
The Stevensons kept the work in the family for generations; the son who refused the trade, Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote Treasure Island instead.
Q 13Whose uncle was a keeper of the Lanterna, the medieval lighthouse of Genoa, in 1449?
Christopher Columbus
Q 21Which was the first lighthouse built in what is now the United States, first lit in 1716?
Boston Light
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.
Q 22Which lighthouse, paid for by a colonial lottery and lit in 1764, is the oldest still working in the United States?
Sandy Hook, New Jersey
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.
Q 23Which president is credited with directing the building of Maine's Portland Head Light?
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.
Q 14What made Swiss inventor Aimé Argand's 1780s oil lamp burn so much brighter than earlier lamps?
A hollow wick
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.
Q 15Which French physicist developed the multi-part lens that bears his name for lighthouses?
Augustin-Jean Fresnel
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.
Q 16A Roman lighthouse some 1,900 years old still stands inside the grounds of which English castle?
Dover
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.
Q 17Which country's oldest lighthouse, the 'Patriarch of Lighthouses', was completed in 1611 at the Gironde's mouth?
France
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.
Q 18Which Outer Banks lighthouse, striped like a barber pole, is the tallest brick lighthouse in the United States?
Cape Hatteras
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.
Q 19Minot's Ledge Light off Massachusetts flashes in a 1-4-3 pattern, which has earned it what nickname?
The I Love You Light
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.
Q 20A lighthouse's distinctive paint scheme, such as a barber-pole spiral, serves sailors as what?
A daymark
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.
George Washington
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.
Q 24Which Union general spent the 1850s building lighthouses in Florida and New Jersey before winning at Gettysburg?
George Meade
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.
Q 25Which Red Sea light has a credible claim to be the world's tallest lighthouse?
Jeddah Light
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.
Q 26Split Rock Lighthouse in Minnesota was built after a 1905 storm damaged or sank 29 ships on which lake?
Superior
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.
Q 27Before electric motors, what kept a lighthouse's heavy rotating lens turning all night?
A weight-driven clockwork
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.
Q 28In 1900 all three keepers of the Flannan Isles lighthouse in the Outer Hebrides vanished; what did the official inquiry blame?
A giant wave
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.
Q 29Which English novelist wrote To the Lighthouse, a 1927 classic about a family's long-postponed boat trip?
Virginia Woolf
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.
Q 30A 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
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.