I Can’t Sleep - Lighthouses | Calm Bedtime Reading for Sleep

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Ease into rest with calm bedtime reading about lighthouses to help insomnia and sleepless nights fade away. This soothing episode explores the history and purpose of these guiding beacons, from ancient fires on cliffs to the towering structures that mark coastlines today. Benjamin’s gentle cadence transforms maritime history into a peaceful journey, helping you unwind while learning. With no whispering or hypnosis—just calm, fact-filled storytelling—you’ll find stress easing and your thoughts settling. Press play, imagine the glow of a lighthouse in the night, and drift into sleep. Want More? Request a Topic: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/request-a-topic Ad-Free Episodes: https://icantsleep.supportingcast.fm/ Shop Sleep-Friendly Products: https://www.icantsleeppodcast.com/sponsors Join the Discussion on Discord: https://discord.gg/myhGhVUhn7 This content is derived from the Wikipedia article on Lighthouse, available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) license. Read the full article: Wikipedia – Lighthouse. Happy sleeping! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to a Glassbox media podcast. What if I told you that most of the modern day self-help advice you've been hearing could actually make you worse? The key to a better life isn't about feel-good gimmicks that sound catchy. The Mentally Stronger Podcast gives you access to a licensed therapist who shares science-backed tools that will actually change your life. Hi, I'm Amy Morin, psychotherapist, mental strength trainer, and international best-selling author. In each episode, we cover research-back strategies, like how to stop relying on willpower and start creating habits for lasting change. And the five mental strength-building exercises you can do from your couch. I also speak to world-class experts like Dr. Nicole Kane, who shares how to permanently heal anxiety by addressing the root cause.

With over 200 episodes in our catalog, this podcast is for you if you're ready to crush self-doubt, conquer challenges, become stronger than ever with therapist-approved strategies that can change your life. Listen to Mentally Stronger with Therapist Amy Morin, wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the I Can't Sleep podcast, where I read random articles to bore you to sleep with my soothing voice. I'm your host, Benjamin Boster. Today's episode is from a Wikipedia article titled Lighthouse. A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lenses, and to serve as a navigational aid for maritime pilots at sea or on island waterways.

Lighthouses mark dangerous coastlines, hazardous, shoals, reefs, rocks, and safe entries to harbors. They also assist in aerial navigation. Once widely used, the number of operational lighthouses has declined due to the expense of maintenance and use of electronic navigational systems. Before the development of clearly defined ports, mariners were guided by fires built on hilltops. Since raising the fire would improve the visibility, placing the fire on a platform became a practice that led to the development of the lighthouse.

In antiquity, the lighthouse functioned more as an entrance marker to ports than as a warning signal for reefs and promontories, unlike many modern lighthouses. The most famous lighthouse structure from antiquity was the fair, the pharaohs of Alexandria, Egypt, which collapsed following a series of earthquakes between 956 and 1323. The intact Tower of Hercules at Akorinia, Spain, gives insight into ancient lighthouse construction. Other evidence about lighthouses exist in depictions on coins and mosaics, of which many represent the lighthouse at Ostia. Coins from

Alexandria, Faustia, and Laudicia in Syria also exist. The modern era of lighthouses began at the turn of the 18th century as lighthouse construction boomed in lockstep with burgeoning levels of transatlantic commerce. Advances in structural engineering and new and efficient lighting equipment allowed for the creation of larger and more powerful lighthouses, including ones exposed, to the sea. The function of lighthouses shifted toward the provision of a visible warning against shipping hazards, such as rocks or reefs. The eddy stone rocks were a major shipwreck hazard for mariners sailing through the English Channel. The first lighthouse built there was an octagonal wooden structure, anchored by 12 iron stanchions secured in the rock, and was built by a

Henry Winstonly from 1696 to 1698. The lighthouse was the first tower in the world to have been fully exposed to the open sea. The civil engineer John Smeaton rebuilt the lighthouse from 1756 to 59. His tower marked a major step forward in the design of lighthouses and remained in use until 1877. He modeled the shape of his lighthouse on that of an oak tree using granite blocks. He rediscovered and used hydraulic lime, a form of concrete that will set underwater, used by the Romans, and developed a technique of securing the granite blocks together using dovetail joints and marble dowels.

The dovetailing features serve to improve the structural, stability, although Sweden also had to taper the thickness of the tower towards the top, for which he curved the tower inwards on a gentle gradient. This profile had the added advantage of allowing some of the energy of the waves to dissipate on impact with the walls. His lighthouse was the prototype for the modern lighthouse and influenced all subsequent engineers. One such influence was Robert Stevenson, himself a seminal figure in the development of lighthouse design and construction. His greatest achievement was the construction of the Bell Rock Lighthouse in 1810, one of the most impressive feats of engineering of the age.

This structure was based upon Smitin's design, but with several improved features, such as the incorporation of rotating lights, alternating between red and white, Stevenson worked for the Northern Lighthouse Board for nearly 50 years, during which time he designed and oversaw the construction and later improvement of numerous lighthouses. He innovated in the choice of lighthouse sources, mountings, reflector design, the use of Fresnel lenses, and in rotation and shuddering systems, providing lighthouses with individual signatures, allowing them to be identifiable. identified by seafarers. He also invented the movable jib and the balance crane as a necessary part for lighthouse construction. Alexander Mitchell designed the first screw pile lighthouse. His lighthouse was built on piles that were screwed into the sandy or muddy seabud. Construction of his design began in 1838 at the mouth of the Thames and was known as the Mapland Sands Lighthouse and first lit in 1841.

Although its construction began later, the wire light in Fleetwood, Lancashire, was the first to be lit in 1840. The source of illumination had generally been wood pires or burning coal. The argand lamp invented in 1782 by the Swiss scientist Amé Argon revolutionized lighthouse illumination with its steady smokeless flame. Early models used ground glass which was sometimes tinted around the wick.

Later models used a mantle of thorium dioxide suspended over the flame creating a bright, steady light. The Argon lamp used whale oil, coalze, olive oil, and other vegetable oil as fuel, which was supplied by a gravity feed from a reservoir mounted above the burner. The lamp was first produced by Matthew Bolton in partnership with Argonne in 1784 and became the standard for the lighthouses for over a century. South Forland Lighthouse was the first tower to successfully use an electric light in 1875. The lighthouse's carbon arc lamps were powered by a steam-driven magneto.

John Richardson Wiggum was the first to develop a system for gas illumination of lighthouses. His improved gas crocus burner of the Bailey lighthouse near Dublin was 13 times more powerful than the most brilliant light than known. The vaporized oil burner was invented in 1901 by Arthur Kittston, and improved by David Hood at Trinity House. The fuel was vaporized at high pressure and burned to heat the mantle, giving an output of over six times luminosity of traditional oil lights. The use of gas as illuminant became widely available with the invention of the Delane light

by Swedish engineer Gustav Delane. He used Agamasson, Agha, a substrate to absorb the gas allowing safe storage and hence commercial exploitation. Delane also invented the sun valve, which automatically regulated the light and turned it off during the daytime. The technology was the predominant form of light source in lighthouses from the 1900s through the 1960s, when electric lighting had become dominant. Let's take a break for a moment to let you know about an opportunity at anchor.fm where you can go and support our website on a monthly subscription basis.

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With the development of the steady illumination of the Argonne lamp, the application of optical lenses to increase and focus the light, intensity became a practical possibility. William Hutchinson developed the first practical optical system in 1763, known as a kidoptic system. This rudimentary system effectively collimated the emitted the emitted light into a concentrated beam, thereby greatly increasing the light's visibility. The ability to focus the light led to the first revolving lighthouse beams. where the light would appear to the mariners as a series of intermittent flashes. It also became possible to transmit complex signals using the light flashes.

French physicist and engineer Augustine Jean Fresnoe developed the multi-part Fresno lens for use in lighthouses. His design allowed for the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length. without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional design. A Fresnel lens can be made much thinner than a comparable conventional lens, in some cases taking the form of a flat sheet. A Fresnel lens can also capture more oblique light from a light source, thus allowing the light from a lighthouse equipped with one to be visible over greater distances.

The first Fresno lens was used in 1823 in the Corduan lighthouse at the mouth of the Gironde estuary. Its light could be seen from more than 20 miles out. Fresnel's invention increased the luminosity of the lighthouse lamp by a factor of four, and his system is still in common use. The advent of electrification and automatic lamp changers began to make lighthouse keepers obsolete. For many years, lighthouses still had keepers, partly because lighthouse keepers could serve as a rescue service if necessary. Improvements in maritime navigation and safety, such as the global positioning system,

GPS, have led to the phasing out of non-automated lighthouses across the world. In Canada, this trend has been stopped and there are still 50 staffs. light stations, with 27 on the West Coast alone. Remaining modern lighthouses are usually illuminated by a single stationary flashing light powered by solar-charged batteries mounted on a steel skeleton tower. Where the power requirement is too great for solar power, cycle charging by diesel generator is used. To save fuel and to increase periods between maintenance, the light is battery-powered,

but the generator only coming into use when the battery has to be charged. John Smeaton is noteworthy for having designed the third and most famous Eddie Stone Lighthouse, but some builders are well known for their work in building multiple lighthouses. The Stevenson family, Robert Allen, David Thomas, David Allen, and Charles made lighthouses building a three-generation profession in Scotland. Irishman Alexander Mitchell invented and built a number of screw pile lighthouses despite his blindness. Englishman James Douglas was knighted for his work on lighthouses. United States Army Corps of Engineers Lieutenant George Mead built numerous lighthouses along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts before gaining wider fame as the winning general at the Battle of Gettysburg.

Colonel Orlando M. Po, engineer to General William Tecumseh Sherman in the siege of Atlanta, designed and built some of the most exotic lighthouses in the most difficult locations on the U.S. Great Lakes. French merchant Navy officer Marius Michel Pasha built almost a hundred lighthouses along the coast of the Ottoman Empire in a period of 25 years after the Crimean War, 1853 to 1856. In a lighthouse, the source of light is called the lamp, whether electric or fueled by oil, and the concentration of the light is by the lens or optic. Originally lit by open fires and later candles, the Argonne Hollow Wick lamp and Parabolic Reflector were introduced in the late 18th century.

Whale oil was also used with Wicks as the source of light. Carosine became popular in the 1870s, and electricity in carbide, as settling gas, began replacing carousine around the turn of the 20th century. Carbide was promoted by the Delane Light, which automatically lit the lamp at nightfall and extinguished it at dawn. During the Civil War, many remote Soviet lighthouses were powered by radioisotope thermoelectric generators, RTGs. These had the advantage of providing power day or night and did not need refueling or maintenance.

However, after the breakdown of the Soviet Union, there are no official records of the locations or condition of all these lighthouses. As time passes, their condition is degrading. Many have fallen victim to vandalism and scrap metal thieves, who may not be aware of the dangerous radioactive contents. The four modern strobe lights, lenses were used to concentrate the light from a continuous source. Vertical light rays of the lamp are redirected into a horizontal plane, and horizontally the light is focused into one or a few directions at a time, with a light beam swept around. As a result, in addition to seeing the side of the light beam,

the light is directly visible from greater distances, and with an identifying light characteristic. This concentration of light is accomplished with a rotating lens assembly. In early lighthouses, the light source was a kerosene lamp, or earlier an animal or vegetable oil argon lamp, and the lenses rotated by a weight-driven clockwork assembly wound by lighthouse keepers, sometimes as often as every two hours. The lens assembly is sometimes floated in liquid mercury to reduce friction.

In more modern lighthouses, electric lights and motor drives were used, generally powered by diesel electric generators. These also supplied electricity for the lighthouse keepers. Efficiently concentrating the light from a large omnidirectional light source requires a very large diameter lens. This would require a very thick and heavy lens if a conventional lens was used. The Fresnel lens focused 85% of a lamp's light versus the 20% focused with parabolic reflectors of the time.

Its design enabled construction of lenses of large size and short focal length without the weight and volume of material and conventional lens designs. Fresnel lighthouse lenses are ranked by order. a measure of refracting power, with a first-order lens being the largest, most powerful and expensive, and a sixth-order lens being the smallest. The order is based on the focal length of the lens. A first-order lens has the longest focal length, with the sixth being the shortest. Coastal lighthouses generally used first, second- or third-order lenses, while harbor lights and beacons used fourth, fifth, or sixth order lenses.

Some lighthouses, such as those at Cape Race, Newfoundland, and Makapu Point, Hawaii, used a more powerful, hyper-radiant Fresnel lens manufactured by the firm of Chance Brothers. In recent times, many Fresnel lenses have been replaced by rotating arrow beacons, which require less maintenance. In modern automated lighthouses, the system of rotating lenses is often replaced by a high-intensity light that emits brief omnidirectional flashes,

concentrating the light in time rather than direction. These lights are similar to obstruction lights used to warn aircraft of tall structures. Recent innovations are Vega lights and initial experiments with light-emitting diode LED panels. Experimental installations of laser lights, either at high power to provide a line of light in the sky,

or utilizing low power, aimed towards mariners, have identified problems of increased complexity in installation and maintenance and high power requirements. In any of these designs, an observer, rather than seeing a continuous weak light, sees a brighter light during short time intervals. These instance of bright light are arranged to create a light characteristic or pattern specific to a lighthouse. For example, the Cheveningen lighthouse flashes are alternately 2.5 and 7.5 seconds. Some lights have sectors of a particular color, usually formed by colored panels in the lantern,

to distinguish safe water areas from dangerous shoals. Modern lighthouses often have unique reflectors or raycon transponders, so the radar signature of the light is also unique.