Wednesday 15 May, 12pm GMT, Professor Miles Lewis: ‘The Iron Lighthouse’, chaired by Tara Inniss. 

Professor Miles Lewis is a historian specialising in the cultural history of building technology, principal author of the international text Architectura, and an honorary life fellow of the Comité International d’Architecture Vernaculaire.

The iron lighthouse was developed in Britain in the early 19th century largely in response to the difficulty, expense and danger of building masonry structures in open sea situations.  By the 1840s most new lighthouses in Britain were openwork iron frames, which allowed the sea to pass through with little obstruction. But the engineer Alexander Gordon developed a different model, more resembling the traditional masonry structure – this was a solid cast iron cylinder, which might have the lower levels filled with concrete or rubble for greater stability. Politics now came into play. The Stevenson family, the world’s most famous lighthouse engineers, dominated the British scene and resisted the Gordon type, to the extent that not a single example was built in Britain. Yet in the period 1841-55 Gordon-type lighthouses were exported to Jamaica, Bermuda, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Newfoundland, the Skerki Channel (off Tunisia), Barbados, South Australia, the Falkland Islands and the Cape of Good Hope.

In the later part of the century things changed completely. Lighthouse types diversified, the French become major producers, and Alexander Gordon became Britain’s senior lighthouse engineer. The most remarkable sphere of activity was China, where Britain ran the lighthouse service from 1860 until the early 20th century. One of the lighthouses had its lantern and gear carried off by pirates. The South Cape, Formosa (Taiwan), lighthouse, was in an area inhabited by ‘savages’ and was fully fortified with cannons and a detachment of troops. This succeeded in repelling the ‘savages’ but did not prevent the lighthouse being lost to the Japanese in the Sino-Japanese War of 1884-5.

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