![]() ![]() The bottom twenty feet of the heightened tower were painted grey, while the upper portion was red. One of the great difficulties in elevating light-house towers for the purpose of substituting improved illuminating apparatus, is that of keeping up the existing light while the work is going on and at no point upon our coast will it be more important to prevent the extinguishment of the light for a single night than at Cape Hatteras and Captain Woodbury will make the necessary arrangements to obviate this difficulty.” The Lighthouse Board was quite pleased with the lens: “This magnificent specimen of art, acknowledged to be the most perfect of its kind, it is believed, could not be more appropriately placed than in the position for which it is designed, to warn the mariner in approaching the dangerous shoals off Cape Hatteras, which have so long been the terror of seafaring men. After the Fresnel lens arrived from France, it was placed on display in the Crystal Palace at New York until its lantern room was ready. ![]() The Lighthouse Board, formed in 1852, had the tower raised to more than 150 feet and installed a first-order Fresnel lens, using a $15,000 appropriation made by Congress in 1853. An elevation of one hundred and fifty feet, and a first-class illuminating apparatus, are imperiously demanded, and without any unnecessary delay. There is no single light on the coast believed to require renovation more than this does. Navigators do not, as a general rule, rely upon it sufficiently to warrant them in running for it…. …At present it is of very little use, in consequence of its limited range. There is perhaps no light on the entire coast of the United States of greater value to the commerce and navigation of the country than this. An inspector that year recommended that a much larger dwelling be built “so that seamen can be accommodated when wrecked about the cape.” The inadequacy of the lighthouse was noted the following year: Jennett was in charge of the light and was living in a leaky dwelling. Just one keeper was originally assigned to the station. To make matters worse, violent storms frequently broke through the lantern room windows and extinguished the light. ![]() The original Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, a ninety-foot-high sandstone tower, housed a collection of eighteen whale oil lamps set in fourteen-inch reflectors, but still it wasn’t visible beyond the shoals. Over two thousand ships have foundered and sunk in that treacherous stretch of water, known as “The Graveyard of the Atlantic.” Even when violent storms or hurricanes are not driving ships into the shallow waters, the flat coastline provides no visible landmarks, forcing navigators to sail close to the dangerous shore to get their bearings.Īlthough hundreds of vessels had followed the same fate as the first shipwreck recorded in 1526, no lighthouse was completed along those shores until October 1803, nearly ten years after Congress had authorized its construction. At Cape Hatteras, the Gulf Stream veers into the Coastal Drift, forcing vessels into the dangerous waters around Diamond Shoals, where shifting sands extend more than ten miles from the Cape. However, for other forms of transportation, this coastline proved less accommodating.įor many miles off the coast, two opposing currents flow close to shore the cold-water Virginia Coastal Drift flows south, and farther offshore the warm-water Gulf Stream flows north. From their perspective, this location was ideal: high winds swept over miles of smooth sand that lined a shallow sea. In 1903, on the high dunes of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, the Wright brothers launched their first successful foray into aviation.
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