What Lighthouse Keepers Did Not Do!
The period of automation of lighthouses across the United States, naturally coinciding with the introduction of electricity to light stations, not only reduced the need for more “hands-on” at lighthouses, but it also shrank the need for more “hands-at” – or employing several keepers at lighthouses. A perfect example was us, here at the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse. In the span of about fifty years, from 1887 to 1921, the need for a principal keeper and two assistant keepers was reduced to a principal keeper and a single relief keeper. From the end of World War II to the mid-nineteen fifties, we had a single keeper living on station. Pretty much after that, staffing became periodic; and reduced close to the end to weekly visits and finally, once every two-weeks inspections from the Coast Guard Station across the inlet in New Smyrna. If the light was on, it was on.
In contrast, early lighthouse keeping was always time consuming, physically demanding – no matter how many steps up or down a tower, intellectually challenging, and, at times, truly dangerous. And with on-going changes in technology and corresponding regular and necessary revisions to the editions of the departmental “Instructions to Light-Keepers,” keepers, now US Coast Guardsmen and not US Lighthouse Service personnel who were civilians, had more than enough new learning to deal with.
Don’t You Just Love a Good Myth
The following is Not Folklore: For safety’s sake, the regulations also stated that the bulk storage of kerosene, the combustible oil on hand to be used in the lamp at that time, may not be stockpiled in the lantern room, or for that matter stored inside or near the tower itself.
This leads to the following which is told at many lighthouses, but is Folklore: So, on the majority of their many trips up and in the tower during the day, keepers would also have to carry another or several more of the five-gallon cans of the night’s supply of oil all the way up to the lantern room to prepare for the darkness ahead. All of that carrying up and down of those 5-gallon cans of whale oil and later kerosene, several times a day and night, really tired out our keepers, but all of them, including the wonderful one hundred forty women US lighthouse keepers, did go on to win every arm-wrestling challenge they ever faced. And all, both men and women, bore a resemblance to an earlier Arnold Schwarzenegger on one side of their body. And almost every time they lifted a teacup to their lips, or just blew their nose, they split the seam of their shirt sleeve covering the affected muscular arm or popped the buttons. Unfortunately, we don’t have photographic proof of this, because the keepers became extremely self-conscious of their anatomical abnormality and all deliberately posed standing other-sideways, hiding that enlarged arm in photographs, or by squeezing tightly together and hiding it, if they could, in group shots.
Folklore: What we are really talking about here is the oft mis-told tale of the multifarious, multiple five-gallon cans of fuel being carried up by our intrepid keepers all day or night long.
Nobody, neither muscular women or men keepers, ever carried multiple cans of animal, vegetable, or mineral oil, multiple times, up multiple steps anywhere at any one of America’s 1400 towers. Never.
Let’s look at this logically. At the beginning of American light keeping, our 12 Colonial lights established before the American Revolution, almost without exception, used candles in chandeliers. Their best candles were made of sperm whale oil, and each candle was mounted in front of a mirrored reflector. By the 1840’s, almost every light-giving apparatus, not just lighthouses, used whale oil, and not just from sperm whales. Whale oil was also useful for lubricating many mechanisms, and even served as a base for women’s cosmetics.
Whale oil became extremely popular because it was abundant, cheap and relatively odorless. It burned steady, bright, and lasted longer and somewhat cleaner than other flammable oils like vegetable oils: coconut or olive oil. Initially, plentiful and cheap, until a time when human needs almost eliminated the whole species. Literally, hundreds of whaler’s ships, from many countries around the globe, plied the oceans harpooning the whales, attaching them to ships and rendering the oils, fats and skeletons of their bodies. Whale oil’s peak, worldwide was the late 1840’s and 1850’s. The slaughter of whales and the use of whale oil also spurred the Industrial Revolution in Great Britain and America. Factory lighting using cleaner burning and brighter whale oil allowed more people to stay at their machines working longer hours at their tasks. How long did this go on? It is interesting to note that the last whaler ships went out of New England in 1927.
Without going into gristly details, certain parts of the whale’s internal body fluids and fats combusted and burned better than others. Other parts of the whale, specifically its bones in the era before plastics, were used for many other consumer goods and needs. Ask any woman who wore a corset! Whale bones became almost as valuable as was the oil.
Luckily, over a relatively short span of time, in 1859, mineral oil from wells located in Titusville, Pennsylvania were discovered, and their oils proved more versatile and plentiful than both vegetable and whale oil. Distilling it not only produced many other by-products we now rely upon today, like gasoline, but the new favorite and multipurpose fuel of the mid-19th century, kerosene.
Kerosene had and still has so many uses. It became the 19th century primary fuel used in lighting residences and workplaces, and especially, in our case, the illuminating fuel for all mid-to-late 19th century lighthouses. It was also a heating oil. Wow, it is currently the major preferred jet and rocket fuel, and it is useful in other compounds for chemical products. You can clean with it, cook with it on camp stoves, and even use it for mosquito control. It’s funny to think that we used kerosene to go to the Moon, and we use kerosene to cook with when we are camping. During the time that kerosene was king, most home lamps and even outdoor lighting like streetlamps were converted to kerosene, or to camphine, a distilled and pure turpentine.
Dealing with The Myth
Let’s get back to lighthouse illumination and that great storytelling myth. First, kerosene weighs about 7 lbs. per gallon. The most common size of cans used for most portable tasks like hauling kerosene was a five gallon can. A five-gallon metal can itself weighs about one pound. That is thirty-six pounds total per full can.
Now the myth: The early keepers hauled five-gallon cans of keroseneup the steps to the service or lantern room, five or six times a night or more. Let us use, for example, the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse and five trips per night. The tower has 203 steps to the service room, and another 10 steps up to the lantern room itself. We would then be dealing with a total of twenty-five gallons of kerosene carried to the lantern room, itself, sitting in 5, five gallons cans of kerosene. That is after ascending 1065 steps up and another 1065 steps down and a few miscellaneous steps to the oil house and back.
In all, because we were a First Order tower, we had a large First Order Fresnel lens. As you enter the Lens Museum, the first huge lens you see is our lens which served from 1887 to 1933. Our lantern room is large and that lens was large in that large lantern rooms, but the kerosene needs for that lens would not equal twenty-five gallons during a single winter night of lighting.
The Proof
The longest night of this year, 2024, will be on Tuesday, December 21, at 14 hours and 48 minutes. If we were still using kerosene, smarter people than me helped me to figure this out.
Let’s say we an average of 15 hours lighted time. We know that 30 ounces of fuel is burned an hour on average for a five-wick lamp, for a total use of 450 ounces of kerosene for a 15-hour long night. Divide that 450 ounces by 128 ounces per gallon and that gives us a tiny tad more than 3.5 gallons of kerosene needed for the longest night of the year. That’s way less than one full five-gallon can, or an extra 1 and ½ gallons to serve for emergencies and to prep the lamp in the morning for the next lighting.
The original lamp inside the 1887 Fresnel lens was a brass kerosene lamp with five concentric (circular) wicks within a long glass chimney which directed the light waves through the prisms of the lens. All working together, these elements enabled light to be seen some 18 miles out to sea, while also serving 225 degrees of the horizon. Phew. The only thing a sailor had to do was to stand on a deck at least 15 feet or more above sea level on a clear night. In addition, another one of the primary jobs of the keeper while the light was lit was to keep the brightest of the flame at the height of the mark of the focal plane in the interior of the lens in the lantern room. Keeping the brightest of the light at the focal plane, gives you the greatest bang for the buck. The “magical” prisms in the lens, then, would and do work best to refract and reflect the light. Of course, the keeper had to carefully clean the soot from the interior and exterior of glass chimney, and the prisms, due to the use of kerosene which did produce some soot, periodically trim the wicks of carbon to get a cleaner burn, apply glycerin to the exterior glass of the lantern room in freezing climates (fortunately not here in Florida), maintain the correct amount of oil in the lamp, and follow the instructions on how to do it, to a “T.” Lives depended on ships seeing the light and correcting or maintaining their course accordingly.
The Ponce Inlet lantern room’s Fresnel lens now uses a modern, 1000-watt, seven-inch long halogen EGM lamp, rather than the bulky 1000-watt incandescent bulb when we first electrified in 1933. Prior to that, the Mosquito/Ponce Inlet Lighthouse depended on a live-fire, five wick, kerosene lamp, the type we’ve just been discussing, to illuminate the huge First-Order Fixed Fresnel Lens in the lantern room. (The Third -Fresnel Lens replaced the originally installed 1887 First-Order Lens on September 1, 1933.) Neither lens failed or anything like that, it was the Lighthouse Service’s way of addressing the problem of clarifying the Ponce Inlet Lighthouse fixed to flashing light characteristic to ships at night. We will deal with that interesting change in another blog.
Folklore: Good Heavens, is it was true that there were women lighthouse keepers?
Fact: Yes, why not? About 140 women became keepers of American lighthouses. That will be the subject of a future blog.
