Reine, Lofoten Islands, Norway. In Norway today, all the lighthouses are now unstaffed and automated. But they remain essential to mariners as a visual back-up and to small boats that lack the proper technology. Photo / 123RF
If ever there was a beacon of hope, it is the lighthouse — “immovable, immortal, eminent,” as novelist (and son of a lighthouse designer) Robert Louis Stevenson put it.
The oldest lighthouse still in use, built in Galicia by the Romans, dates to AD 100.
“I can think of no other edifice constructed by man as altruistic as a lighthouse,” George Bernard Shaw once wrote. “They were built only to serve.”
The lighthouse hit its peak in the mid-20th century, before radio, radar and global-positioning satellites made ship navigation nearly inch-precise.
In Norway today, all the lighthouses are now unstaffed and automated.
But they remain essential to mariners as a visual back-up — in case the fancy electronics fail or are scrambled by Russia’s military — and to small boats that lack the proper technology.
Norway is undertaking a grand renovation of its lighthouses in accordance with the International Association of Marine Aids to Navigation and Lighthouse Authorities, which sets the standards for maritime signalling.
The effort coincides roughly with the 200th anniversary of the Fresnel lens, a marvel of glassmaking artistry and optical science that revolutionised seafaring and global commerce.
‘Another heaven’ on Earth
Early lighthouses were lit by open wood fires; later ones with lamps fuelled by pitch, tar, coal and, starting in 1780, oil.
This light, in turn, was cast outward by ever more elaborate mirrors that sat behind the lamp.
Even the best light was scattered and feeble, visible from no more than a few kilometres away. A ship could founder on sandbars by the time it saw the warning.
In 1823, a French engineer, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, unveiled the Fresnel lens: concentric rings of glass prisms that, meticulously aligned, bent the light into a unified beam.
Much less light was lost, and much fuel was saved. Stationed high enough, the light could be seen by ships 80km away.
At the time, scientists insisted that light was composed of particles.
Fresnel championed the new “undulationist” theory, that light acts as a wave, and his lens proved its utility beyond doubt. (Physicists today recognise that, improbably, light is both a wave and a particle.)
Lighthouses equipped with Fresnel lenses soon lined the French coast. Other nations quickly adopted the technology, starting with Norway in 1832. The number of shipwrecks around the world plummeted.
“For the sailor who steers by the stars, it was as if another heaven had descended to earth,” French historian Jules Michelet wrote in 1861.
Upgrading a nation’s lightscape
The Fresnel lens focused the aspirations of the Industrial Age. It made shipping safer, projected global ambition and catalysed international trade.
“The moment a Fresnel lens appeared at a location was the moment that region became linked into the world economy,” Theresa Levitt wrote in A Short Bright Flash, her history of the invention.
Today, small Fresnel lenses are everywhere, from traffic lights to stage lights. But the production of lighthouse-scale glass lenses ceased in the 1960s.
Those that remain are fragile, expensive to maintain and hard to repair, for lack of parts.
Many of Norway’s Fresnel lenses were destroyed in World War II by retreating German forces. Only 80 or so are still in use.
Technicians with the Norwegian Coastal Administration have been visiting the lighthouses one by one, upgrading older lamps and replacing diesel generators with solar arrays.
Some Fresnel lenses are moved to museums; some are dismantled, to serve as spare parts elsewhere. Where Fresnel lenses remain, they are delicately cleaned and repaired.
Naturally, this work is best done in summer, when daylight lasts for weeks and most lighthouses are turned off.
The lenses are kept shrouded under curtains or cosies to prevent the sun, focused as if through a magnifying glass, from starting fires.
A radiant culture
As well as a guardian to mariners, the lighthouse served as anchor and emblem to many isolated coastal communities.
Norway’s lighthouses are no longer staffed, but in their time, each was maintained by locals, sometimes clusters of families, who kept the lamp working, did repairs and wiped the lens free of smoke.
At some lights, this work was done around the clock in four-hour shifts — a life as arduous, meticulous, and vital as any aboard a ship.
For four generations, the family members of Espen Jensen Wilhelmsen, an electrician with the Norwegian Coastal Administration, tended the light at Maursund by rowboat from their farm across the strait.
With Wilhelmsen’s help, the light is now fully modernised and automated.
Waves upon waves
“The most surprising part about dealing with lighthouses is how much they are a sensory experience,” photographer Michal Siarek said.
During the polar summer, the low sun hits the lens and projects hypnotising patterns on the walls. In winter, the light catches your eye as it sweeps across the landscape.
“It brings a sense of reassurance that someone is on duty and watching,” Siarek said.
“The low machine hum of the rotor and the warmth of the light in the lantern room feel like basking in the sun, against a raging storm outside that makes the tower tremble and sing.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Alan Burdick
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