Great Storms and Lighthouse Losses
Storm as Test and Catastrophe
No other class of building is as deliberately exposed to extreme weather as the lighthouse on an open coast. The great wave-swept towers — those built on isolated rocks and reefs far from any shore — were placed precisely where storms are at their most violent, because that is where the hazard they mark exists. Engineers designing these structures had to calculate not merely the weight of the tower but the dynamic force of breaking waves, which can exceed 3,000 kilograms per square metre. Some towers succeeded spectacularly. Others were swept away, and the history of their replacement defines much of lighthouse engineering.
The First Eddystone
The first lighthouse on the Eddystone reef, 22 kilometres south of Plymouth in the English Channel, was completed by Henry Winstanley in 1698. Winstanley was an eccentric engineer who added decorative wooden superstructures to his tower in a succession of elaborate modifications, convinced that his design would withstand any storm. His confidence was total: he reportedly said he wished to be inside the lighthouse during the greatest storm there ever was. On 26 November 1703, the Great Storm swept across southern England with sustained winds measured by contemporaries as unprecedented. When daylight came, the Eddystone lighthouse had vanished entirely. Winstanley, who had spent the night inside making further alterations, died with his workmen. The storm killed more than 8,000 people across England, wrecked hundreds of ships, and destroyed much of the Royal Navy's Channel fleet at anchor.
A second wooden Eddystone was built by John Rudyerd and completed in 1709. This survived until December 1755, when the lantern caught fire; the keeper who looked up at the burning optic subsequently died from lead poisoning caused by swallowing molten lead that dripped from the burning structure onto his upturned face. John Smeaton's famous masonry tower, completed in 1759, was the direct response to these disasters, and its stepped interlocking granite construction became the template for every major wave-swept tower that followed.
The Bell Rock
The Bell Rock, or Inchcape, is a submerged sandstone reef in the North Sea off the Angus coast of Scotland. It lies almost entirely submerged at high tide, revealing itself for only a few hours each day, and had been responsible for an extraordinary number of shipwrecks for centuries before the lighthouse was proposed. The engineer Robert Stevenson, then superintendent of the Northern Lighthouse Board, spent eleven years from 1800 to 1811 planning and building the tower, working only during the brief windows of each tide when the rock was exposed enough to permit construction. The result was a 35-metre granite tower completed in 1811, its interlocking stone courses based directly on Smeaton's Eddystone principle, and it has stood through every North Sea gale since then without significant damage. Its light character is a flashing white every five seconds, visible 18 nautical miles.
The Minot's Ledge Disaster
The first lighthouse on Minot's Ledge off Cohasset, Massachusetts, was one of the most technically controversial structures of the nineteenth century. The engineer Captain William Swift designed an iron-pile structure, its slender legs bolted to the submerged ledge, and it was completed in 1850 over the protests of engineers who argued that the structure was insufficiently rigid. On the night of 16-17 April 1851, a severe nor'easter struck the New England coast. The two assistant keepers in the tower sent distress signals throughout the night; the following morning the structure was gone, both keepers drowned. Only the pile stubs remained bolted to the rock.
The replacement tower, designed by General Joseph Totten and built under the supervision of Barton Alexander and others over nine years from 1855 to 1860, was a massive granite structure on the model of the Bell Rock and Skerryvore. Its light character — one flash, four flashes, three flashes (1-4-3) — was popularly interpreted as "I love you" by Cohasset residents, giving the lighthouse its nickname of the Lovers' Light. The tower stands intact today, an active aid to navigation maintained by the US Coast Guard.
Skerryvore and the Challenge of Exposed Rocks
Alan Stevenson built Skerryvore on a remote reef 19 kilometres southwest of Tiree in the Hebrides between 1838 and 1844. The rock barely shows above sea level in calm conditions and is regularly overwhelmed by Atlantic swells. The granite tower rose 48 metres, and Stevenson reported in his published account of the construction that winter storms buried the rock entirely under breaking seas that rose higher than the tower's base platform. The structure survived, and after 180 years of exposure to the worst the North Atlantic can produce, the Skerryvore tower has never needed structural repair to the main shaft.
The Portland Bill and Great October Storm
The Great Storm of October 1987 was the worst windstorm to cross England and Wales since 1703. It uprooted 15 million trees, killed 18 people, and caused over one billion pounds of damage. Several minor lighthouse structures and aids to navigation suffered damage, but no major towers were lost — a testimony to the construction standards established in the nineteenth century. Modern automated monitoring allowed Trinity House to dispatch inspection teams within hours to assess and repair affected equipment.
The capacity of the great towers to outlast the storms that were supposed to destroy them is part of their popular appeal. The Fastnet lighthouse in County Cork, whose rock was the scene of one of the worst disasters in offshore yacht racing history during the 1979 Fastnet Race, stands as it has since its completion by William Douglass in 1904. The tower is 54 metres tall, built of Cornish granite on a stepped base that deflects wave impact, and its exposed position in the southwest approaches to the British Isles means it regularly experiences severe Atlantic conditions. Open the map to find the locations of these historic wave-swept towers and see them in their maritime context.
Lessons in Endurance
The destruction of early lighthouse structures taught engineers specific lessons: wood cannot survive on a wave-swept rock; iron is vulnerable to corrosion and dynamic fatigue; the interlocking masonry system pioneered by Smeaton distributes horizontal loads far more effectively than conventional bonded courses. These lessons are now absorbed so thoroughly into lighthouse engineering practice that the failures that generated them are easily forgotten. But the full record — from Winstanley's optimistic wooden tower on the Eddystone to the pile foundations of Minot's Ledge — is one of the most informative case studies in the history of structural engineering in extreme environments.