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The coal
-
fired Wee Cumbrae Lighthouse
,
built 400
-
feet above sea level in 1757 by James Ewing
CLYDE LIGHTHOUSE TRUST 1755
-
1965
For a relatively small service, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust more than punched its weight ininnovation, it the first lighthouse authority in Great Britain or Ireland to be allowed to buildlighthouses and to collect light dues for their maintenance and, in conjunction with thebrilliant Stevenson firm of lighthouse civil engineers, its trustees and engineers developingthe very first lit flashing buoy; the very first radio controlled automatic fog gun, the very firstsynchronisation of radio and sound signals, the first equiangular prism, the very firsteconomical use of the silver-backed glass mirror system, the first fog horn installation inBritain with a regular designated characteristic and the first diaphone fog signals and firstelectric buoys in Europe.What follows here is essentially 'an expansion of the detail' in an article by Hector Mackenziein the 2006 Newsletter (4th Quarter, Volume 4, Issue 4) of The World Lighthouse Societyhttp://www.fyr.org/Pdffiler/4thqtr2006newsletter.pdf   The addition and 'expansion' of this article is felt warranted on the grounds that much historyis lost when, by reason of 'space limitations' on many websites, often dictated by by therising costs of 'bandwidth' charges etc., newsletters, particularly and other 'important tosome' webpages are deleted, the scribd 'archives' and the pages of the websites associatedwith the uploads here, regularly trawled by 'The Internet Archive'http://www.archive.org/web/web.phpwhich, operating since 1996, has managed to preserve1
 
much valuable material which otherwise would have been lost to future researchers as manywebsites disappeared without trace after only a short life in 'cyberspace'. The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust, set up in 1755 by an Act of Parliament, was the first publicbody to be established in Great Britain for the express purpose of erecting and maintaininglighthouses, beacons and buoyage and to collect light dues, these also to pay for the removalof shoals for the improvement of navigation below Greenock and any surplus of dues to beretained to provide equipment for Greenock Harbour and to improve the river above Greenock,in 1781, the constitution of The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust was revised by Parliament andthe authority became known as The Clyde Lighthouses Trust (CLT).Interestingly, at the time The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust was set up, thirty years before TheScottish and Irish Lighthouse Boards were instituted, Trinity House had the right to erectseamarks but did not then have the power to collect dues for their maintenance.In 1757, James Ewing built the new trust's Wee (or Little) Cumbrae lighthouse 400-feet abovesea level, on what was later named Lighthouse Hill, the cost, £140 5 shillings and 8 pence,considered low. The lighthouse tower a circular stone structure standing 28 feet high, with anexternal diameter of 18½ feet and its internal diameter 12½ feet, the lighthouse keepersaccommodated in a cottage about thirty feet north of the tower.Coal, for the open fire in a grate at the top of the tower, came from pits near Cambuslangand was brought by horse and cart to Irvine and then sent by boat to the island, the coalburning so fiercely that the fire-grate had to be replaced after only one year and it thenreplaced regularly thereafter. The Act of Parliament which gave The 'Cumray' Lighthouse Trust the right to levy a charge of one penny sterling per tonne for every British ship on a foreign voyage (excluding HisMajesty’s warships) and two pence sterling per tonne from any foreign vessels which passedthe light, one half-penny per ton being charged on 'home traders' over 30 tons and up to twopence per ton on 'home traders' of between 15 and 30 tons, the light dues were to prove veryprofitable and, in March 1773, the dues from the light were used to pay for the quelling of amob of sailors who had brought business to a halt in Greenock and Port Glasgow for ten days. The inherent limits of coal-fired lights, combined with the tower's position on top of a hill,meant that The Wee Cumbrae light was often obscured by cloud or fog and complaints fromseamen led to a plan in 1790 to replace the light in the tower with another tower nearer thecoast and, in 1793, Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson, grand-father of Robert LouisStevenson, completed the new lighthouse installation on the west of the island, The New Tower, 36 feet high and of unpainted stone, fitted with the new 'catoptrics' lighting systemhaving 32 oil lamps and silvered glass reflectors and using mirrors, rather than lenses.In 1826 the illumination was upgraded to 15 argon lamps and the new lighthouse alsoequipped with a foghorn, slipway, jetty and boathouse.Increasing traffic into the Clyde ports and surpluses from the light dues allowed The Trusteesto build The Cloch Lighthouse, in 1797 and then one at Toward Point, in 1812, the year whenHenry Bell's steamboat, the "Comet", first appeared, both lighthouses lit with oil lamps andreflectors. Though The Clyde Lighthouses Trust was not involved in the developments of the new French'dioptric' system, the developments largely done by French and English glassmakers and TheNorthern Lighthouse Board, these optics were installed at both Cloch and Cumbrae and thelights upgraded and fuelled by acetylene when they became available.2
 
Built around the end of the 1880's, the Garroch Head Light, known to as. Rubh'an Eun, at theeastern point of Glencallum Bay on Bute, an automatic lighthouse on the opposite side of TheCumbrae Channel from The Wee Cumbrae Lighthouse, had a lens of 1330 mm focal distance,with prisms made of equiangular section, installed, the equiangular prisms designed by theStevenson lighthouse engineers to give a greater brilliancy of light up and down the narrowchannel and no other such unmanned light anywhere having a lens with such a focal length.In 1930 The Trustees installed a more powerful light at Toward Lighthouse, the Stevensonsrecommending a new departure, large parabolic, silver-backed, glass mirrors being installedwith a focal length of 1000 mm, the new glass mirrors gave a brilliant light for less than athird of the cost of a lens and the mirrors at Toward giving a more powerful light than adioptric lens of identical area and using an identical light source.Unlike the metal and glass mirrors of old, which were plated on the surface with silver,rhodium or aluminium, Toward's mirrors were easily kept clean and polished and wereresistant to scratching.Whilst the prisms in a dioptric apparatus could not be adjusted after factory testing, the bigadvantage of the mirrors wasthe fact that they could be adjusted accurately at the time of installation, by takingobservations from the sea.. The silver-backed glass mirror system was later taken up by the French and to some extent by The Northern Lighthouse Board and The Commissioners of Irish Lights, most stations havinglenses which did not need to be replaced and the Toward's mirror system was later installed ine.g. the Tusker Rock, Girdleness, Rona and Langness, on The Isle of Man, lighthouses. The Clyde was the first estuary and river anywhere in The World to be lit by buoys andbeacons, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust first establishing an offshore gas light at Port GlasgowPerch in 1861, the fixed light expensive to run and requiring frequent attendance and The Trust eventually solving the problem of lighting buoys in 1880 when they laid a buoy atRoseneath Patch, the very first in The World to use oil gas, which could be compressedwithout too much risk and, thanks to The Trustees' innovation, thousands of these similarly litbuoys soon in use worldwide and The Trustees again leading the way with a European firstwhen they introduced American-designed electrically lit buoys on The Clyde in 1933. The Trustees too installed what is understood to be the first fog signal in Britain at CumbraeLighthouse in 1865, ten years before the first fog signal installed by The Northern LighthouseBoard, the compressed air generated by a coal-fired Ericsson caloric (hot air) engine, a fogsignal later installed at Kempock Point and The Trustees trying out whistles of differentpitches, one sounding after another, at The Cloch Lighthouse. The first automated steam-powered foghorn was invented by Robert Foulis (May 5, 1796 - January 28, 1866) who, born in Glasgow, emigrated to Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1818,following the death of his first wife in childbirth, Foulis noted as inventor, civil engineer andartist.Settling in Saint John, Foulis was appointed deputy land surveyor in 1822 and, after surveyingthe upper Saint John River for the feasibility of steam shipping, he became involved with thebuildings of several early steamboats and the first Saint John harbour ferry.Foulis founded the province's first iron foundry in 1825 and a school of arts in 1838 and laterpatented a gas light apparatus that was later used in lighthouses and, thanks to his daughter,3
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