Automation and Heritage
The History of Lighthouses
Course 8 · Chapter 9 · Automation and Heritage
In the last decades of the 20th century the keepers left the lighthouses, and radar and satellite navigation took over much of the work of the light. Yet the towers did not disappear. Many are still lit, many have become museums, hotels or holiday cottages, and the lighthouse has become one of the most familiar images in art and writing. This chapter follows the story from automation to heritage and asks what a lighthouse is for today. Names, dates and figures are from general knowledge and flagged "check".
The End of the Keepers
Automation
Electric lamps, automatic lamp changers, remote monitoring and, for remote towers, solar power and batteries made it possible to run lights without a crew. Automation spread through the 20th century, station by station (check).
The last keepers
The last keepers left the Eddystone in 1982 and the Bell Rock in 1988 (check). The last manned Scottish lighthouse, on Fair Isle South, was automated on 31 March 1998, and Trinity House's last, at North Foreland in Kent, later that year (check).
The reasons
The chief reason was cost: wages, housing and supply by boat or helicopter. Reliable electric equipment made the keepers' work unnecessary, and the boards argued that automation was also safer, since fewer people were put at risk by landing on rocks (check).
Radar, Radio and Satellites
| Technology (check each) | What it did |
|---|---|
| Radio beacons | From the early 20th century, stations transmitted signals that a ship could use to find its bearing in fog, when the light could not be seen. |
| Radar | Developed in the Second World War, radar showed coastlines and other ships on a screen, and by the 1960s was common on merchant ships. |
| Radio navigation systems | Systems such as Decca and Loran gave position from signals from shore stations, and were widely used until satellites replaced them. |
| Satellite navigation | The Global Positioning System, available to civilians from the 1990s, gives a position anywhere with great accuracy, and is now on almost every ship and in every phone. |
| AIS and charts | Automatic identification systems broadcast each ship's identity and position, and electronic charts show the ship's position in real time. |
What Do Lighthouses Do Now?
- Backup. Satellite signals can be jammed, spoofed or lost, and equipment can fail. The lighthouse authorities of Britain and Ireland keep their lights partly as a back-up and are interested in other back-up systems (check).
- Small craft. Fishing boats, yachts and many small vessels use lights as an easy check on position and to identify the coast.
- Mark of a danger. Even a ship with GPS needs to know where a rock is. A light is a physical, permanent mark of it.
- Modernised. Many lights now use LED lamps, solar panels and remote monitoring, and the tower is only the support (check).
The answer to "are lighthouses obsolete?" is therefore "less needed than in 1900, but still used". Exercise 1 asks you to put this into a careful sentence.
Heritage and Reuse
| Use (check each) | Example or note |
|---|---|
| Museums | The Scottish Lighthouse Museum at Kinnaird Head in Fraserburgh, opened in 1990, the Bell Rock Signal Tower in Arbroath, and the Hynish shore base for Skerryvore on Tiree, now a museum (check). |
| Visitor attractions | Smeaton's Tower on Plymouth Hoe can be climbed, and other lighthouses allow tours (check). |
| Holiday lets and hotels | Keepers' cottages and some towers are rented to visitors. Income from them helps to pay for the buildings (check). |
| Private sale and community ownership | Some stations, no longer needed by the authorities, have been sold or leased to individuals and trusts, with debates about access and upkeep (check). |
| Legal protection | In Britain and elsewhere many are listed buildings. In the United States a law of 2000 set up a scheme for transferring surplus lighthouses to local groups (check). |
Erosion and rising seas also threaten towers: the move of the Cape Hatteras lighthouse in 1999 (Chapter 7) was an early case of preserving a tower by shifting it, and others may follow (check).
In Art and Literature
- Novels. Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927) uses a family's holiday and the trip to a lighthouse as its frame (check). Robert Louis Stevenson, trained as a lighthouse engineer, wrote of the sea and islands in many works (Chapter 4).
- Poems. W. W. Gibson's poem about the Flannan Isles of 1912 is among the best known (Chapter 6, check).
- Painting. Lighthouses appear in the work of Edward Hopper and many other painters, as solitary buildings on the edge of the land (check).
- Film. Several films use the lighthouse as a setting for isolation and strangeness, a theme that feeds the myth of the mad keeper (Chapter 10).
- The symbol. The lighthouse stands for guidance, safety, loneliness and endurance, and is used in logos, charities and everyday speech ("a beacon of hope"). Which of these meanings is meant depends on the work.
Exercises
Test the claim "Lighthouses are obsolete" with the six questions and give a more careful sentence.
Imagine a decommissioned lighthouse with keepers' cottages on a headland. List three possible uses, with the advantages and risks of each, and say what you would want to know first.
Choose one novel, poem, painting or film that uses a lighthouse and say what it shows about how lighthouses are imagined, and what it cannot show about how they worked.
Quick Reference
- Automation: Eddystone 1982, Bell Rock 1988, Fair Isle South 1998 (check)
- Replacements: radio, radar, Decca and Loran, GPS, AIS
- Heritage: museums, holiday lets, listed buildings, community ownership
- Image: guidance, loneliness, endurance