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Essay · 6 min read
Every evening at dusk, the keeper climbed the spiral stairs to light the lamp. He wrote the weather in a ledger that nobody else would ever read. Wind from the west, visibility good, two boats heading north. The entries are short, but together they make a kind of diary of the sea.
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More about notes →Essay · 7 min read
For most of the nineteenth century, a lighthouse was the most expensive thing a coastal town would ever build. The stone came by sea, and the lens came from Paris.
Economists later used the lighthouse as their favourite example of something no market would provide. A ship could not be charged for seeing a light, so nobody would ever pay to build one.
In England, private owners did build lights, and collected dues from ships at the nearest port. It worked for two hundred years.
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More about what gets read →The Bell Rock Lighthouse is the oldest surviving sea-washed lighthouse in the world.[1] It was built between 1807 and 1810 on a reef in the North Sea, eleven miles off the coast of Scotland.[2][3]
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More about PDFs →On the Keeping of Lights
1 Introduction
Lighthouses were financed by dues collected at port, set by tonnage and by the number of lights a vessel passed. The scheme survived for two centuries, long after its critics said it could not work. This paper follows the ledgers of three stations.
2 The ledgers
Each keeper wrote the weather, the boats that passed and the oil burned. Read together, the entries are a diary of the sea. We transcribed 41,000 of them.
The entries are short and regular, which makes them easy to count and hard to misread.
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