Surely these were words spoken, or similar expressions of relief, gratitude, and amazement, for the better part of nine decades, as legions of mariners navigated around the deadly dangers of Diamond Shoals. For more than 25,000 nights, this light flashed from a lighthouse at Cape Hatteras, delivering its signal of assurance, caring, and guidance through the green-tinted crown-glass of its French Fresnel lens.
Some engineers create from nothing, inventing new and hopefully useful objects. Other engineers take currently available objects and through craft and ingenuity, transform them into better, more useful objects. David Porter Heap, a little known contributor to our lighthouse heritage, did some of each. However, his main talent was in improving the designs of others, reducing their cost and simplifying their construction. He can truly be called the "Great Improver" of the United States Lighthouse Service. The following story will outline some of his life and work.
We were in the midst of a very "poor man's tour" of Britain. For two nights, we had, in fact, slept in our tiny rented car to keep from paying exorbitant Bed and Breakfast bills. The time had come for a real bed and a hot shower. Now we were on our way to Holyhead to take the Irish ferry to Dun Lagohaire (which is pronounced DunLairy - the Irish are very poor, why do they waste letters so?) Speaking of letters, we were passing through Wales. Their road signs are in both Welsh and English. No, that's not true...their road signs are actually half Welsh and half English.
In 1940 I was assigned to the 190 foot buoy tender Anemone, operating out of Woods Hole and New Bedford, Massachusetts. The Coast Guard had just taken over the Lighthouse Service (July 1939) and there were many changes that the members of both services had to become accustomed to. The first assignment I was involved with on the tender was the moving of the Head Keeper of the Great Point Light Station, located on the northeast shorespit of sand on Nantucket Island. The keeper's name escapes me, but I remember him well because of the things that happened and that he was 75 years old.
In the sunshine, the powerful, stocky tower of Macau's Guia lighthouse first appears to hundreds of incoming hydrofoil travelers as an indistinct white dot. At night it vanishes and its light takes over, giving more the effect of soundless, gentle pulsations. Its self rotating mechanism turns for a period of twelve hours, quietly guiding vessels into Macau waters.
You see many unusual lighthouses when you take a U.S. Lighthouse Society tour. I was lucky to join such a tour of England and found the range lights at Harwich particularly interesting. These lights are amongst the oldest in England and are examples of very early range lights (what the English would call "Leading Lights"). They began life in private hands, were eventually bought by the Trinity House, were rebuilt or improved four times, were replaced by lights at another location, and were finally abandoned during their multi-century history.
Beeeohhhh, the mournful sound of the fog signal hooting and echoing across a bay shrouded in gray. It seems as thought that sound must have always been part of the bayscape. But, in fact, fog (correctly termed, sound) signals are relative newcomers to the field of navigational aids, and the most popular of them, the diaphone and diaphragms, are of the twentieth century.
Beeeohhhh, the mournful sound of the fog signal hooting and echoing across a bay shrouded in gray. It seems as thought that sound must have always been part of the bayscape. But, in fact, fog (correctly termed, sound) signals are relative newcomers to the field of navigational aids, and the most popular of them, the diaphone and diaphragms, are of the twentieth century.
The first colonial American aid to navigation, of which we have firm evidence, was the beacon erected at Nantasket (now Hull) Massachusetts in 1673. The beacon was a small stone tower erected at Point Allerton, a promontory guarding the south approach to Boston Harbor. The citizens of that community provided funds to furnish "fier-bales of pitch and ocum" in an iron basket surrounding the small beacon.
Lewis continued his inspection noting that off the beaten path lighthouses often had more lamps and reflectors than major seacoast harbor lights, like Boston; that some areas had clusters of lights and other stretches were devoid of any light at all. He attackecl the rated range of the various lights.