Lighthouse Design and Construction

The earliest lighthouses were simply bonfires built on hilltops to guide ships.  The light from a bonfire could not have been very bright or traveled vary far.  No doubt it was better than no light at all, but things were to improve, once greater safety became a concern

Some early lighthouses were wooden but most were made of stone or brick with a round or actagonal lantern enclosure on top. The first were illuminated by oil burning lamps which were limited in the amount of light they could produce.

The first real breakthrough came with the Argand lamp. In 1812 Winslow Lewis furthered improved the Argand lamp by combining it with a parabolic reflector, giving more light and direction.

The first American lighthouses on the Great Lakes were built between 1818 and 1822.

• Fort Niagara at the mouth of the Niagara River on Lake Ontario 1818
• Preque Isle at Erie Pennsylvia on Lake Erie 1819
• Galloo Island Light 1820
• Lights at Oswego on Lake Ontario 1822
• Rochester Harbour 1822

With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825 and the Welland Canal in 1829 the Great Lakes region enjoyed tremendous growth in population and commerce. Consequently the number of lighthouse on all the lakes in both the United States and Canada grew along with it.

More American lighthouses were added between 1825 and 1830.

• Big Sodus Bay Light on Lake Ontario 1825
• Fairport 1825; Buffalo 1828; Cleveland 1829; Otter Creek and Barcelona 1829 all on Lake Erie.

The first lighthouse on Lake Huron were erected on the American shoreline. The first, the Fort Gratiot Light, at the entrance to the St. Clair River went into service in 1825. And also on Lake Huron Bois Blanc Island Light in 1829.

By 1840, there were four American lighthouses on Lake Huron. The first Canadian lighthouse went into service in 1847 at Goderich.

The first American lighthouse on Lake Michigan were Chicago Harbor Light and St. Joseph River both built in 1832.

The first lighthouses on Lake Superior were built as follows: At Whitefish Point, in the season of 1847; Copper Harbor, in 1848; Eagle Harbor, in 1850; Ontonagon, in 1852, and Marquette, in 1853.

By 1852 there were 76 operating American lighthouses.

• 27 on Lake Michigan
• 21 on Lake Erie
• 9 on Lake Ontario
• 8 on Lake Huron
• 6 on Lake Superior
• 5 on Lake St. Clair and the Detroit River

During the nineteenth century the design of Great Lakes lights slowly evolved. Until 1870 the most common design was to build a keeper's dwelling and place the light either on the dwelling's roof or on a relatively small square tower attached to the dwelling. In the 1870's, in order to raise lights to a higher focal plane, conical brick towers, usually between eighty to one hundred feet in height, began to be constructed. In the 1890s steel framed towers began to replace the older generation of brick structures.

Between 1870 and 1910 engineers also began to face challenges created by building lights on isolated islands, reefs, and shoals that posed significant hazards to passing ships. These remote lights, usually built on underwater cribs, often replaced lightships, which was the only practical way originally available to warn sailors away from dangerous underwater rock formations. Ships, however, proved difficult to maintain. They could not be put in place until after the start of navigation season and often had to be removed before the season's end. Worse, regardless of the type of anchors used lightships could be blown off their expected location in severe storms, making them a potential liability in the worst weather when captains would depend on the charted location of these lights to measure their own ship's distance from dangerous rocks.

Ten lightships were still operational, 129 fog signals were maintained, as were about 1,000 buoys. Of these 1,771 navigational aids, in 1925 only about 160 stations had resident keepers. Even at this early date, the vast majority of navigational aids had been automated. By 1925 virtually all of the Great Lakes lighthouses that today exist had been constructed.

In 1925 ten lightships were stationed on the lakes, however twenty years later only one ship, the Huron, was still in service. The Huron would remained stationed off Corsica Shoals in Lake Huron until 1970, when this last active lightship on the lakes was decommissioned. Automation also slowly changed the face of navigationalaids.

Lightship Huron docked at the Port Huron Museum For more information ckick here

The keeper's residence, the tower, and all the other buildings and structures that were constructed at a light station existed to make visible and maintain one piece of equipment, the light itself.

In the first half of the nineteenth century, generally used a lighting system designed by Captain Winslow Lewis. The Lewis apparatus used a lightly silvered parabolic shaped reflector to amplify the light created by an Argand lamp that burned whale oil. In the field, the reflector in the Lewis apparatus warped very quickly and the lightly silvered surface was quickly abraded away by the tripoli powder, an abrasive of the day commonly used to clean brass, that was used to clean it. The result was that lights quickly grew dim and were of minimal help to sailors.

A far superior apparatus was introduced by French physicist Augustin Fresnel in 1822. The Fresnel lens used a series of glass prisms that surrounded the light source in a lenticular (double convex) configuration. Looking a bit like a beehive the result was a bright, single beam of light that was far superior to anything else available in its day. Fresnel lens were classified into six "orders" based on the focal length of the lens, however seven sizes of light actually existed because a "third and a half" order lens was made. The largest, a first order lens, had a focal length of 36 inches, a lens diameter of six feet, and stood nearly twelve feet tall. In contrast a sixth order lens had a focal length of only 5.9 inches, a diameter of under one foot and was about two feet in height. Fresnel

The French and English quickly adopted this new lens for their lights and demonstrated the Fresnel lens superiority. Pleasanton, however, who had become close friends with Lewis and relied on him for technical advice, stubbornly refused to install the Fresnel lens in American lighthouses despite its obvious superiority. In 1851 Pleasanton oversaw over 300 lights nationwide of which only three had Fresnel lens, each installed because of direct congressional action.

In 1852, the Fresnel lens became the preferred lighting apparatus in American lighthouses. By the late nineteenth century the Fresnel lens was in service throughout the Great Lakes. No first order lens was ever installed on the lakes, leaving the five second order lens placed on the lakes the brightest to be lit. By the 1920's Fresnel lens began to slowly give way to other forms of lighting apparatus, however as late as 1986 about one hundred Fresnel lens were still in use on the lakes.

A variety of different lights replaced the Fresnel lens. Lenses similar to those used on train engines were often used as range lights.

Self-contained lens-lantern lights, that relied on electricity for power, also were developed, and over time became the new standard light for light houses and other illuminated navigational aids.

About the time that the Fresnel lens first began to appear on the Great Lakes new lamps were also being placed in service to replace the Argand lamp. Several lamps were used but all shared similar designs, using from one to four concentric wicks, depending upon the amount of light desired. Because of the near extinction of the sperm whale, new fuels were also required. In the late 1850s the lights were fueled with colza (rapeseed) oil. This decision, however quickly proved impractical as the oil was manufactured from a rarely grown plant.

In the 1860s preheated lard oil had become the most common fuel used in lighthouses. Preheating, however, was difficult and required keepers to somehow keep the oil warm as it was brought from a stove to the light. The development of the incandescent oil vapor lamp allowed the board in 1877 to adopt kerosene as the primary fuel for lights, and by 1889 incandescent oil vapor lamps fueled by kerosene were used in almost all the lights on the Great Lakes.

As early as 1886 experiments were conducted using electricity. It would not be until the twentieth century, however, when the electric power distribution grid became widespread and reliable portable electric generators were readily available, that electricity would become the common way to illuminate lighthouses. In 1925 sixty-eight major and forty-five minor Great Lakes lights, or about one-quarter of the total in service, used electrical power. By the early 1940s virtually all the lights on the lakes were powered by electricity.

The use of electricity also greatly facilitated the automation of the lights. As early as 1916 a device was introduced that could automatically replace a burned-out incandescent light bulb. Coupled with electrically run timers that turned the lights on and off, it became increasingly possible to run lighthouses with only an occasional visit for servicing and maintenance. Automation eventually replaced keepers. Today all the lights on the lakes are maintained through occasional visits by Coast Guard maintenance crews.

Canadian Lights on the Great Lakes up to 1867. .

Lights in the Lake Ontario
Lights	Date of Establishement
Kingston	1844*
Snake Island	1858*
Nine Mile or Gage Point	1833
Outer Drake or False Ducks	1828
Point Pleasant or Indian Point	1866
Salt Point	1851*
Point Peter	1833
Scotch Bonnet or Egg Island	1856
Presqu'ile	1840
Cobourg	1844*
Peter Rock or Gull Island	1840
Newcastle	1847*
Oshawa, outer end, East Pier	1844
Whitby	1844
Frenchmans Bay or Pickering	1863*
Gibraltar Point	1808
Toronto Harbour, West Entrance	1838
Port Credit	1863*
Oakville	1863
Burlington Bay, South Tower, Railway Bridge	1838
Burlington Bay, South Pier	1845
Port Dalhousie	1852

Lights in the Lake Erie
Lights	Date of Establishement
Port Colborne	1852*
Mohawk Island	1848
Port Maitland	1846
Port Dover, West Pier	1846*
Long Point or North Foreland	1843
Port Burwell or Big Otter Creek	1840*
Port Stanley	1844
Point Pelee Reef	1861*
Pelee Island	1833*

Lights in the Detroit River
Lights	Date of Establishement
Bois Blanc	1837*

Lights in the Lake St. Clair
Lights	Date of Establishement
Thames River	1837

Lights in the Lake Huron
Lights	Date of Establishement
Goderich main light	1847
Point Clark	1859
Chantry Island	1859
Cove Island	1859*
Griffith Island	1859
Nottawasaga Island	1859
Collingwood	1858*
Christian Island	1859
Killarney East Or Red Rock Point	1866
Killarney West or Partridge Island	1866
Little Current	1866*
Clapperton Island	1866
Spider Island	1866

Lights in the Lake Superior
Lights	Date of Establishement
St. Ignace	1866*

Lights marked * are no longer in existence although, in some cases, new ones may have been built nearby since 1867.

Segments of this page has been reproduced from Fisheries and Oceans Canada information.