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Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders
Date 2007
Event ID 610077
Category Descriptive Accounts
Type Publication Account
Permalink http://canmore.org.uk/event/610077
In the 18th century the island of Inchkeith was a notorious hazard to ships in the Forth. After the Aberdeen was
wrecked nearby in 1801, the Northern Lighthouse Board decided to build a lighthouse there. This was the first lighthouse for which Robert Stevenson was solely responsible under Edinburgh lamp manufacturer and Northern Lighthouse Board Engineer, Thomas Smith, whom he succeeded in 1808. It is 62 ft tall and of high-quality masonry in a fashionable architectural style. The foundation stone was laid in May 1803 and the work completed in September 1804, with Argand lamps and state-of-the-art silvered copper reflectors developed by Stevenson. The convenience of the lighthouse location to the Board’s headquarters facilitated numerous lighting innovations.
In 1786 a new form of reflector oil lamp had been designed by Smith and first tried at Inchkeith. When the Isle of May fixed light became operational in 1816 Stevenson’s apparatus at Inchkeith was converted into one of the earliest flashing lights.
In 1835 Britain’s first dioptric light (using refraction through lenses) was installed at Inchkeith underAlan Stevenson’s direction. The 1804 reflecting apparatus was re-installed at Cape Spear, near St John’s, Newfoundland, where it remained in service until 1963 and is now preserved. In 1889 the Inchkeith light was upgraded by D. A. Stevenson and the 1835 apparatus was presented to the Industrial Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh.
R Paxton and J Shipway 2007
Reproduced from 'Civil Engineering heritage: Scotland - Lowlands and Borders' with kind permission from Thomas Telford Publishers.
