Some thirteen miles (21 kilometres) out in the Channel, south of Plymouth, a scatter of red rocks barely breaks the surface at high water. For centuries the Eddystone reef sat squarely in the sea lane of every ship making for one of England's great naval ports, and it collected wrecks the way a drain collects leaves. The story of the four towers built on it — one drowned, one burned, one turned into the template for every rock lighthouse since — is close to a founding myth of civil engineering, complete with hubris, fire and an engineer who learned structural design from an oak tree.
The first man to try was Henry Winstanley, an Essex engraver, merchant and professional showman who ran a house of mechanical practical jokes and a "Mathematical Water Theatre" in London. After two ships in which he had an interest came to grief on the Eddystone, he resolved to light it himself, and between 1696 and 1698 he did something nobody had managed before: he built a lighthouse on a small, wave-swept rock in the open sea. Candles were first lit in November 1698. The project even acquired a wartime subplot — in 1697 a French privateer carried Winstanley off the rock, and Louis XIV is said to have ordered his release with the remark that France was at war with England, not with humanity. The quotation appears in every retelling and in no contemporary document, so treat it as polished legend. Winstanley, supremely confident in his ornate, much-strengthened tower, declared that he wished to be inside it during the greatest storm that ever blew. On the night of 26–27 November 1703 the Great Storm — the worst in recorded English history, which killed perhaps eight thousand people — granted the wish. By morning the lighthouse had vanished entirely, taking Winstanley and everyone in it. Within days a merchant ship wrecked on the once-again-dark reef.
Fire and molten lead
The second tower, completed in 1709 by John Rudyerd, a London silk merchant with no engineering training, was everything Winstanley's was not: a smooth, modest timber cone that gave the sea nothing to grip. It worked for 46 years, until the night of 2 December 1755, when the lantern caught fire. The keepers retreated down the burning tower and one of them, Henry Hall — aged 94, by the usual account — stood hurling water upwards at the flames when molten lead from the roof fell into his open mouth. He survived the rescue and lived twelve more days; the post-mortem, reported to the Royal Society by an incredulous local doctor, found a flat lump of lead of roughly 200 grams in his stomach. The lump itself survives in a museum collection — one of medicine's strangest exhibits and one of engineering's darkest anecdotes.
The oak tree in granite
The third tower is the one that changed the world. John Smeaton, a Yorkshire instrument-maker recommended by the Royal Society, asked a designer's question: what shape does nature use to stand against storms? His answer was the trunk of an English oak — broad at the base, curving inwards as it rises. He built it in stone at a time when received wisdom said only timber could survive the rock, cutting blocks of Cornish granite and Portland stone that interlocked with dovetail joints, like carpentry rendered in rock, pinned with marble dowels. To bind them he developed a hydraulic lime mortar that set under water — work that points directly towards modern cement and concrete. The light was lit on 16 October 1759, and the tower shrugged off the Channel for 120 years. Smeaton described himself as a "civil engineer" — essentially inventing the term to distinguish his trade from military engineering — and the society of engineers he helped found in 1771 made the profession respectable. When Robert Stevenson came to build the Bell Rock lighthouse half a century later, he began from Smeaton's tower.
The sea never beat Smeaton's building; the geology did. By the 1870s the rock beneath it was found to be cracking under the tower's own resonant shudder, and Trinity House commissioned a fourth, larger tower on an adjacent rock from its engineer-in-chief James Douglass. Lit in 1882, standing about 49 metres, it earned Douglass a knighthood and still guards the reef today; it was automated in 1982, a neat century later, with a helideck above the lantern. Grateful Victorians dismantled Smeaton's upper tower stone by stone and re-erected it on Plymouth Hoe, where it stands as a red-and-white memorial gazing out at its successor — while its granite stump remains rooted on the reef beside Douglass's tower, still refusing, after two and a half centuries, to fall down. Four towers, one rock: the sea taught, and eventually, an entire profession learned.
Quiz nuggets
- Henry Winstanley's 1698 tower was the first lighthouse on a wave-swept offshore rock; he died in it during the Great Storm of November 1703.
- Keeper Henry Hall, reportedly 94, swallowed molten lead during the 1755 fire that destroyed Rudyerd's timber tower and died twelve days later.
- John Smeaton modelled his 1759 granite tower on an oak trunk, using dovetailed blocks and hydraulic lime mortar that set under water.
- Smeaton coined the term "civil engineer" and helped found the first society of civil engineers in 1771.
- The fourth tower, by Sir James Douglass, was lit in 1882 and automated in 1982; Smeaton's upper tower now stands on Plymouth Hoe.