Читать книгу Lighthouses - Peter Williams - Страница 11

Of the aforementioned optical scientists, Augustin Fresnel was French while Brewster and Chance were British. Fresnel achieved fame in the science of lighthouse illumination ahead of his British rivals because he was connected to the French lighthouse nexus, while the other two were not, and it was in France that the dioptric lens was first employed. The rivalry between France and Britain in the science of lighthouses is thus a theme running throughout this book.

It was only through co-operation and competition – both benign and ruthless – with French lens makers that Chance Brothers was able to reach a pre-eminent position by the 1860s. French and later Swedish and German manufacturers were the firm’s principal competitors in the lighthouse business, while in glass manufacture the French, notably St Gobain, were again prominent, and at home Pilkington’s was the emerging leviathan. As the home of dioptric lenses, France maintained its dominance through the combined efforts of at least eight firms – François Soleil, Jean Jacques François, Louis Letourneau, Henry-Lepaute, Sautter-Harlé, Barbier et Fenestre, Barbier et Bénard and Barbier, Bénard et Turenne. In Scotland, preeminent (in fact solitary) was the Stevenson family, while the enormous US market was at first supplied by American and later by French manufacturers. That Chance Brothers supplied only a handful – perhaps 15 first- to fourth-order lights in all – of lenses to America is due to the close relations maintained between US maritime authorities and the French (France’s military and diplomatic support for the Colonies in the War of Independence was not forgotten) as well as to the inability of Chance’s to establish capable agents in New York and Washington. Chance Brothers nevertheless competed successfully in the traditionally French-dominated territories of Russia and the Black Sea countries and even supplied 23 lights to France.

At the turn of the 19th century, British lighthouses were the pride of her navy, merchants and the lighthouse administrators in London, Edinburgh and Dublin. Trinity House, which controlled the lighthouses of England and Wales, was the oldest and most respected lighthouse authority in Europe, and British shores were better protected by lighthouses than any other country. But 50 years later a vastly different picture had emerged. In 1858, Parliament was forced to appoint a Royal Commission to investigate the status of Britain’s and her empire’s lighthouses, buoys and beacons, which had come in for scathing criticism by both her naval and merchant seafarers. The critics were particularly contemptuous of the lighthouse systems of England and Wales and those of the Colonies, while Scotland, under the direction of the Stevenson’s, engineers to the Commissioners of Northern Lights, came off more lightly.

England had ceded leadership to her arch enemy France, not only in administration, but also as the recognized authority on lighthouse science and engineering. Britain’s industrial and maritime supremacy was felt across the globe, yet her commitment to protecting her seamen and merchant fleets from shipwrecks was far from evident. In France, lighthouses were the beneficiary of a strong relationship between the scientific community and government. The French lighthouse authority was highly centralized, with most lighthouses under state control. So, when a brilliant optical scientist, Augustin Fresnel, invented a new method of illuminating lighthouses using lenses, it was immediately applied to nearly all French lighthouses. In Britain, the worlds of science and government endured an awkward relationship, with less state patronage for both scientists and their institutions. Trinity House was a guild operating under its own ancient royal charter and the Elder Brethren who ran it jealously guarded their independence from government. They were sceptical of science, with not a single recognized scientist occupying a senior post. Unlike in France, British lighthouses were mainly in private hands, a source of profit for their owners who charged fees to passing ships. In short, the French lighthouse system was rooted in science, hierarchical, regulated and unified, while in Britain it was split between a conservative institution run by retired seamen and lighthouse entrepreneurs who resisted interference from London.

This is why the revolutionary lighthouse lens introduced in 1822 has ever since been named after a Frenchman, Augustin Fresnel, though Scotsman David Brewster had a valid claim to be its true inventor. In 1812, Brewster invented a lens almost identical to Fresnel’s, but its potential for lighthouse illumination wasn’t recognized by Trinity House, if it knew about it at all. Fresnel was lauded as a hero of science in his home country; Brewster was an outsider whose temperament upset the establishment and whose early insight that lenses would transform lighthouse illumination was ignored by the authorities. After Fresnel announced the new technology, Trinity House and the Northern Lighthouse Board failed to follow the lead of their French counterpart for more than 15 years. Trinity House only appointed a recognized scientific advisor in 1835, and chose an experimental chemist – Michael Faraday – when all the attention across the Channel was on the science of optics. Michael Faraday’s experiments with optical glass in the early 1830s had been a signal failure, so if Trinity House wanted to promote lens manufacture in England, Faraday’s appointment was a strange way of going about it.

It was not until the 1858 Royal Commission discovered James Chance that the importance of optical science was finally recognized in Britain, and she began to regain her pre-eminence in lighthouse illumination. The intervening 40 years were a time of procrastination in Britain, while in France the new lens technology was quickly adopted. The Stevenson’s, after much prevarication, also adopted it but relied on French manufacturers for most of their supplies. One English firm, Cookson’s of Newcastle, tried to emulate the French, but their lenses were shoddy by comparison. Chance Brothers entered the business in 1851 but it took them 10 years to perfect the technology. James Chance was the only man in Britain who was able first to equal and then surpass the French in the design and manufacture of lighthouse lenses. He combined four branches of engineering – optical, mechanical, electrical and civil – into one to create the modern lighthouse-engineering discipline. These were in turn fused with Chance Brothers’ manufacturing muscle and commercial drive to establish the greatest force in the world lighthouse industry. This was a major breakthrough that changed the manufacture of lighthouse illumination equipment in Britain from a back-street metalsmiths workshop into the large industrialized glassmakers works found at Chance Brothers.