Northern Lighthouse Board
Books
- Eleven Miles Out Robert Stevenson, John Rennie, and the Building of the Bell Rock Lighthouse · Liszt Think
Eleven miles off the Scottish coast, a reef lies submerged for twenty hours a day. In the early nineteenth century, raising a granite tower on this treacherous foundation seemed impossible.
- The Rock and the Reckoning…hose who examined the rock was Robert Stevenson, then thirty-three years old and already responsible for several lighthouse designs for the Northern Lighthouse Board. Stevenson had trained under Thomas Smith, his stepfather and the Board’s chief engineer, and had supervised the construction of lights at…
- The Engineer’s Apprenticeship…1798 the sea had not let it alone for three weeks. Robert Stevenson, twenty-two years old and three years into his apprenticeship with the Northern Lighthouse Board, watched from the deck of the tender as the swell broke white across the half-built tower. The masons had managed six courses of stone befo…
- A Ship Moored Over the Reef…work would take months. The season would end in October. Stevenson understood the arithmetic. He had spent ten years in the service of the Northern Lighthouse Board, learning how to translate parliamentary appropriations into standing towers on impossible sites. He knew that the Board’s patience was not…