Ten things you didn't know about lighthouses

Top 10 facts you didn't know about lighthouses.

THE Young Artists of the Royal Opera House will tonight be staging a performance of Peter Maxwell Davies’ ghost story opera The Lighthouse. But that is not the only reason to think of lighthouses today…

 

1. On October 22, 1707, four Royal Navy ships ran aground off the Scilly Isles killing more than 1,500 sailors and Admiral Sir Cloudesley Shovell. 

2. The Bishop Rock Lighthouse, which might have averted the disaster, was finally built in 1887. 

3. Bishop Rock is the world’s smallest island with a building on it… 

 

Bishop Rock is the world’s smallest island with a building on it



The Lighthouse of Alexandria, built around 280BC, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World.

4. …and since 1976 it has even had a helipad at the top of the lighthouse.

5. From 1886 to 1902 the Statue of Liberty in New York Harbour was officially a lighthouse. An electric light in its torch was visible for 24 miles. 

6. The Lighthouse of Alexandria, built around 280BC, was one of the Seven Wonders of the World. 

 

In 1912 Gustaf Dalen won a Nobel Prize for an invention making unmanned lighthouses possible.

7. Damaged by earthquakes in 956 and 1303 it was abandoned after another earthquake in 1323. 

8. In 1912 Gustaf Dalen won a Nobel Prize for an invention making unmanned lighthouses possible. 

9. Despite being blinded in an accident in 1912 Dalen went on to invent the Aga cooker. 

10. The opera at the Linbury Theatre tonight is based on a mystery in the Orkneys in 1900 when three lighthouse keepers vanished without trace.