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HISTORY OF BIG SUR COAST

  A new dawn:              Locals had long called for a road along the coast to aid shipwreck victims and improve access to isolated communities.  Construction started in 1919, and 18 years, 32 tonnes of dynamite and 33 bridges later, the Big Sur stretch of California Highway One was complete.               The implausible route, with its myriad twists and turns and dramatic drop-offs, became an instant classic.  The author and painter Henry Miller fled to Big Sur in 1944 and stayed for nearly two decades.  Photographer Edward Weston and Beat Generation bard Jack Kerouac fell under its spell.  By the late 1960’s San Francisco’s counterculture revolution had swept down to Big Sur, and the likes of Joan Baez and Joni Mitchell performed on the cliff tops.              ...
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BELL ROCK LIGHTHOUSE - ONE OF THE SEVEN WONDERS OF THE INDUSTRIAL WORLD

 Lighting the way:

Bell Rock Lighthouse


            The Bell Rock’s source of illumination was revolutionary for its era.  Smeaton’s Eddystone Light had attempted to penetrate the infamous Scottish fogs with nothing more than a chandelier mounted with candles.  For Bell Rock, Stevenson and his stepfather, Thomas Smith, a former lamplighter in Edinburgh, designed an apparatus of 24 silver-plated reflectors on a revolving frame, with panes of red glass fronting the reflectors on the two short sides.  Power to turn the frame was supplied by a drum wound with a weighted, descending rope.  As the rope unwound, the drum turned.  The resulting intermittently flashing red light became Bell Rock’s signature.

              In February 1811, the first revolving light shone forth, visible for 35 miles (56km).  That original system operated for 30 years before the first upgrade, and the light has changed with technology several times since, being lit over the years by spermaceti (whale) oil, paraffin, diesel and acetylene gas.  Today, the light is powered by batteries charged by solar panels, with generator backup, and is fully automated.  The lighthouse was manned until 1988.

Still saving lives:

               The Bell Rock Lighthouse has been called one of the ‘Seven wonders of the industrial world’.  Beautiful and lonely, it has inspired artists and poets including J.M.W.Turner and Sir Walter Scott.  But it is ordinary fisherman and sailors, whose lives it continues to save, who most appreciate the efforts of the brave men who built it.


Location: United Kingdom

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