The lighthouse stevenson.., p.17
The Lighthouse Stevensons, page 17
The most significant of the relationships that Robert, and later Alan, forged with their engineering contemporaries was with a pair of Parisian brothers, Leonor and Augustin Fresnel. By the 1820s, the Fresnels were to optics what Smeaton was to seatowers. Their work was singular for several reasons. Firstly, they were amongst the few scientists in Europe at the time to take the study of light seriously, and secondly, they devoted much of their time to finding practical applications for their experiments. Most importantly, from the Stevensons’ point of view, the Fresnels were working closely on the perfect form of the lighthouse lens.
The link between the two families was first forged during Robert’s tour of the French lights in 1820. Robert had taken himself off to see Corduan, the most famous of Europe’s early lighthouses. The light had been built originally in the fifteenth century, and then repaired with much ceremony by the architect Louis de Foix in 1570 under orders from Henri III. Since the French King believed that all public works should reflect the greater glory of the monarchy, Corduan was reconstructed to look more like a classical temple than a lighthouse. Tiered like a wedding cake and decorated down to the last curlicue, it was the most elaborate lighthouse in the world, far exceeding even Winstanley’s subsequent flourishes on the Eddystone. It took twenty-five years to complete and drove its architect almost to madness. Unfortunately, it was only after it was completed that de Foix realised the light was more exposed to the sea than he had initially supposed. In despair, he composed a poem to be engraved on the side of the building, challenging the gods to hurl their worst at his architectural wonder and cursing them for their indifference to his trials. In 1612, the gods responded. A bolt of lightning struck the top of the lighthouse and destroyed it. Construction work was taken over by another architect, Chatillon, who strengthened de Foix’s foundations, while radical work in the 1780s swaddled the whole structure in a plain casing of fresh stone.
By the time that Robert saw it in the 1820s Corduan was more an example of archaeology than architecture, with so many succeeding layers of work outside and in that the original structure barely survived. It was less the building than the lighting that interested him, however. While Robert was still experimenting and refining his silvered reflector lamps in the Scottish lighthouses, Augustin Fresnel had taken a different approach and had sought to magnify the beam by placing reflectors behind the light and prisms in front. The difference between catoptric lights (in which the lens or reflector was placed behind the flame) and dioptric (in which the lens was placed in front) was akin to the difference between candles and electric light. Even the first tentative versions of the lenses strengthened the beam from a maximum of 1,000 candlepower to around 3,000 candlepower. Admittedly, the first lenses were clunky, primitive objects, more like giant myopic spectacles than the elegant prisms of later years. But the leap had been made, and all that remained was to refine the prototypes. Robert, having seen Augustin Fresnel’s work, wrote to him and the two established an enthusiastic correspondence.
Fresnel’s lenses also unwittingly became the subject of another of Robert’s battles. When he returned to Scotland intending to test the effectiveness of lenses for use in the Northern Lights he discussed his findings with a friend, Dr David Brewster. Brewster, he knew, was interested in optics and prided himself on his knowledge of fashionable new sciences. But instead of being curious about Fresnel’s works, Brewster was incensed. He claimed he had been the inventor of lenses for lighthouses, and produced as evidence a paper written some time previously advocating the use of ‘polyzonal lenses’ as ‘burning instruments’ for use in lights. He demanded that his lenses should be introduced to all the Scottish lights forthwith, and full credit given to him for their invention. Robert ignored Brewster’s blusterings, but recommended to the Commissioners that lenses on the Fresnel model should be tested and then introduced gradually. A prototype was set up at Inchkeith light, and, though partially successful, needed modifications and was removed again for the time being. The Commissioners asked for further tests. Robert, being habitually cautious about major changes in designs and lighting, accepted their suggestions and began the slow process of adapting the lights for his purposes.
The NLB’s prudence did not satisfy Brewster. In 1827, two years after the dispute had begun, he presented a paper to the Royal Society of Edinburgh ‘On the theory and Construction of Polyzonal lenzes and their combination with Mirrors for the purpose of illumination in lighthouses’. In it, he accused the Commissioners of pandering to ‘sordid interests’, and Robert himself of professional malpractice. Robert, furious, wrote to Brewster demanding a copy of the paper, and insisting that the ‘mistakes’ should be removed. Brewster refused. Robert wrote back, complaining that this was not the kind of behaviour expected of Royal Society members, and insisting that ‘I have only again to state that I had no other object than to correct inaccuracies which seem to have crept into it.’ Brewster again refused to let Robert see the paper, so Robert wrote to the RSE, demanding that the paper should be vetted by them and possibly withdrawn until the dispute had been settled. The RSE replied that Brewster’s version should stand. Robert, reduced to impotent pique, announced that he ‘decline[d] having anything further to do with the paper’.
It was soon evident that Brewster was not the kind of amiable opponent that Rennie had once been. He had a bilious temper and an infinite capacity to nurse a grudge. Once provoked, he considered himself engaged in a justified war for lenses over reflectors. In 1833, Robert finally tested the different equipment by setting up a display of French lenses, English lenses and Scots reflectors twelve miles from Edinburgh, which were viewed by the Commissioners from the top of Calton Hill. The Fresnel lenses, it was concluded, gave the strongest, steadiest beams, far superior to even the best of reflectors. Brewster, who appeared on the hill to press his case, wrote immediately to the Commissioners insisting that the results proved Robert’s reactionary intentions and demanding that he, Brewster, should be appointed to the Northern Lighthouse Board to fit and supervise the new lenses. In a subsequent letter, his enthusiasm ran away with him and he declared that lenses should be fitted forthwith in every light in Scotland, that gas should be substituted for oil and, with a final flourish, that all the existing Scottish lighthouses should be ‘dismantled’ and rebuilt to suit the new specifications. The Commissioners, infuriated by Brewster’s demands, delayed the results of their enquiries still further. Brewster, considering that the delays only proved the criminal intentions of the Board, enlisted Westminster in his cause.
Joseph Hume, a radical English MP, had made it a personal mission to investigate and remove all abuses of power within the public service. It was a laudable aim with meddlesome ends. The Scottish lights worked well as they were and Hume had little to teach the Commissioners about either parsimony or bureaucracy. Nevertheless, Hume established a Parliamentary Select Committee of forty-six members in 1834, ordering them to conduct a thorough review of all the lighthouse authorities and to investigate Brewster’s allegations.
The Committee studied everything from the way the separate administrations were managed to the relative benefits of different fuels. The NLB Secretary Charles Cuningham, the Commissioner James Maconochie, Robert and Alan Stevenson were all called before the Members to vouch for the NLB’s works. Between them they answered over 1,200 questions on the Scottish lights. The Committee’s report recommended sweeping changes to both the English and the Scottish services. Trinity House, the Irish lights and the NLB were to be merged and given a base in London; light dues were to be paid to the Treasury who would then parcel out a sum to the centralised administration, and the English lights in private ownership were to be nationalised. In Scotland’s case, the Committee also proposed that all work on the lights should be done by locals, and hinted darkly that they considered the NLB’s chief engineer had altogether too much power.
Uproar ensued. An anonymous letter to the Edinburgh Evening Post, probably written by Captain Wemyss, one of the Commissioners, pounded out its disapproval of both the report and the subsequent bill. ‘The motion,’ said the writer, ‘is nothing more or less than a barefaced, unpatriotic and absurd proposition to place the Lights of Scotland under the Trinity Board in London…Let Scotland take alarm at such bold inroads on her national individuality and let her point the finger of contempt and raise the slogan of shame on her Humes, Murrays, Fergusons and such representatives…In conclusion, I would merely enquire whether that algebraical pated blockhead Hume knows anything at all of the subject whereon he prates so glibly?’ Robert himself ridiculed both the suggestion that he would be able to find well-trained masons in the isolated settlements of the isles and the plan for amalgamating the three administrations. Trinity House, he pointed out, had been criticised in the report for ‘jobbing and plunder’, its lighthouses were a disgrace, and the service was still being run for individual profit, not public benefit. The Scottish lights, by comparison, were prudently managed, successful, and relied almost entirely on close local understanding. Why then should the inefficient English service take over the efficient Scots one? The Irish service made similar objections and the bill was acrimoniously debated in the Commons.
Hume finally backed down a little. The three administrations would be allowed to remain separate, he conceded, but Trinity House was nevertheless to take on an overall supervisory role. All new lighthouse work had to be authorised by them and no new lighthouses could be built until Trinity House allowed it. Separate tolls would be abolished for the Scottish and Irish lights, and there would now be one due paid by all shipping round the British coast. The compromise satisfied no one. Brewster had found no better support for his cause in London than he had in Edinburgh, and as far as the Commissioners were concerned, the Act, even in modified form, interfered with their independence. The whole process had taken months of argument, time that would have been better spent on practicalities. Brewster, never one to accept defeat with good grace, did not diminish his campaign. Indeed, time and parliamentary indifference only seemed to make him angrier.
Though Fresnel’s lenses were gradually accepted and adopted in all the Scottish lights – following a much more thorough enquiry by Alan Stevenson – Brewster still brooded. Almost thirty-five years after the original dispute had begun, Brewster continued hurling broadsides at Robert and all his descendants. He wrote a piece for the Scotsman in June 1860 announcing ‘a Review of the Conduct and Writings of Messrs Robert, Alan, David and Thomas Stevenson, as engineers to the Scottish Lighthouse Board, in reference to their Ignorance of the proper optical arrangements for Lighthouses and Distinguishing Lights – their perversion of Scientific History – their interested and obstinate opposition to the substitution of Lenses for hammered Reflectors – and their calumnies against the inventors of the Dioptric System of Lights, now in universal use, introduced into Great Britain by the persevering labours of Sir David Brewster and into France by the celebrated philosopher MA Fresnel.’ The audience for this dispute had clearly grown exhausted some time ago. The Scotsman itself warned ‘against any third party attempting to act as judge or umpire between the combatants’, and a letter to Brewster from M. Biot of the French Academy of Science announced peremptorily that ‘he conceived the wrongs Sir D Brewster complained of to be purely imaginary, and concluded that by saying that at their time of life such retrospective polemics should be avoided.’
The whole dispute had achieved almost nothing except proof of Brewster’s temper and Robert’s over-cautious habits. Perhaps some of the public humiliations, and much of the parliamentary wranglings, could have been avoided if Robert had been keener to adopt new technology; perhaps there was a speck of truth in Brewster’s allegation that the Commissioners’ chief engineer was granted too much power. But the core of the argument – that Brewster, not Fresnel, should be credited with the invention of lighthouse lenses and that the Commissioners and Robert had acted criminally in failing to adopt them – had been proved false. The only useful consequence of the saga was to demonstrate beyond doubt that Robert’s successors were more than worthy of their name and position. Robert’s dithering over the adoption of lenses and his habit of retreating into bluster and pomp when threatened seemed at odds with Alan’s intelligent analysis of the new methods. It had been Alan who had understood the science of lenses, Alan who had adapted them for Scottish purposes, and Alan who had done most to ensure their success. Robert might have made more noise, but Alan, it seemed, was going to be more than a match for his father.
SIX
Skerryvore
The helicopter skims low over Mull, dipping past swatches of forestry and fox-red moorland. Out beyond, past Staffa and Fingal’s Cave, lies the Atlantic, placid today but easily roused. Away to the left juts the remnant edges of the Scottish mainland; up on the right, Tiree and Coll appear flattened against the horizon. The helicopter flies on, low over the water, past ladders of sunlight and clusters of rock.
Finally, just when the passengers can see nothing but the width of the ocean and the size of the sky, there is a flash of whiteness up ahead. At first it’s only a disturbance in the water, then a small blackened stub appears, rising up out of a ruff of surf. A little closer, and the passengers can see a tangle of black rocks stretching away to the left with the sea beating itself repeatedly against their sides. Rising up from the centre of the reef, like the spire of some subterranean cathedral, is a dark tower. On its crown is a diamond-paned lantern, a weather vane and a balcony rail; down the sides are tiny slitted windows like a row of buttons. To one side is a rudimentary pier, and on the right a concrete pad marked with an ‘H’. A few whiskery seals watch the helicopter’s approach, then flump off the rocks into the water to join the sea birds. The helicopter lands and the passengers scurry away to crouch under the lee of the tower.
Up at the top of a precipitous iron ladder and through the nine-foot thickness of granite, there is a metal door, barred and padlocked. Inside, there are more ladders, a confusion of machinery and a strong smell of neglect. The rooms of the tower reach up and up, through an endless succession of batteries, generators and flickering technology. The only break is for a tiny kitchen (as cosily fitted as anyone could wish) and two cramped little rooms, containing narrow bunk beds and a portholed window. Up and up, one ascends past more machinery, more ladders, more clutter, and finally to the light room. Outside, the wind thuds against the walls. From the balcony rail, there is a sudden overwhelming landscape of faraway islands and ocean. At your feet lie hundreds of dead birds, guillemots and gulls, blackbirds and curlews. During the migrating season, the lantern becomes an immense candle courted by giant moths. The birds flock in such huge numbers here that it is considered too dangerous to go out on the balcony. Up above, past the cranes and aerials, is the diamond-patterned lantern. Inside, three circular lenses revolve silently round the light, catching and refracting the weak daylight so the bulb appears by turns large and small, large and small. A cardboard box on the floor contains a few replacements, each the size of a punctured rugby ball.
A fire during the 1950s gutted much of Skerryvore. Automation took the rest. All that remains of its creator is a few wrought-iron sea serpents holding up a railing in the lantern, and the tower itself. That tower is still extraordinary. Walk slowly around the curve of the base, and it looks for all the world as if it grew from the rocks of its own accord. The dips and summits of the reef fit the walls so closely that it is difficult to work out which parts are nature and which artifice. The first few courses are black Tiree gneiss, as organic as the roots of an old tree. Further up, the stone is pinkish. From a distance it looks like the last surviving remnant of a petrified forest. Skerryvore has been described as the most beautiful lighthouse in the world. It is twelve miles from the nearest land, and was built to be avoided.
If you take the more conventional route to Skerryvore, you catch a different angle. The daily CalMac ferry from Oban to Tiree passes round the Sound of Mull, stops at Coll and then docks finally near a broad sweep of honey-coloured beach. Tiree is a treeless island, beaten almost flat by the winds hurtling overhead on their way to the mainland. At the far end of Gott beach, beyond the bright insect wings of the wind-surfers, is a ramp of black rocks and a few scattered houses. The shore is thick with flotsam – plastic bottles, old nylon rope, fishboxes, margarine tubs. Buried in the coarse grass every few yards is a rusty iron buoy, solid as a bomb. At the other end of the island, past the holiday-cottage blackhouses with their humpbacked roofs, is Hynish. There’s a picturesque cove with a pristine harbour, several sturdy workmen’s cottages, recently restored and now used for Outward Bound courses, and a lacework of stone walls, crumbling in places but still intact. At the top of a small hummock is a squat tower shaped like the butt-end of a Victorian castle. Inside the staircase winds upwards past a succession of fading posters and photographs – illustrations of building works, pictures of bowler-hatted workmen, a Scotsman obituary to an engineer. An immense bell lies in a corner stamped with the imprint of a lighthouse and the words ‘In Salutem Omnium’. At the top are a collection of museum pieces, a silvery argand lamp with its wick still unlit, a storm lantern and a pair of binoculars fixed against the wall gazing blindly out towards the sea. The place looks deserted save for the lone staggering inhabitant of the keepers’ cottages walking his dog round the houses again and again.
