Daily Archives: 05/09/2010

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Lighting the Way: The Light on Bell Rock

What’s some of the most dangerous working-conditions you can think of? Cleaning the blades of a jet-engine? Jackhammering rocks off a cliff-face? Repairing overhead powerlines? Crab-catching in the North Atlantic? Working in a gas-station convenience-store at 2:00am?

How about building a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean? How about building a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean where the tide can come surging in at a moment’s notice to a depth deep enough to drown you in a matter of minutes, every single day of the year? How about building a lighthouse on a rock in the middle of the ocean with killer tides and huge, scary storms that swamp the rock for half the time in the year?

Interested? Read on.

Bell Rock, Scotland

Inchcape, or ‘Bell Rock’ is a tiny, Godforsaken piece of crap, stuck off the east coast of Scotland. ‘Bell Rock’, the common nickname for Inchcape, is a particularly dangerous stretch of rocky reefs which for centuries, had been a hazard for local shipping plying trade along the eastern Scottish coastline. The rock’s notoriety for destroying anything that dared sneeze at it, is legendary. In the 1300s, the Abbott of Arbroath, a town in the district of Angus, in eastern Scotland, tried to install a warning-bell on the reef, to alert passing ships. The bell lasted the grand total of one year, before, depending on which sources you read, the bell was either washed away by the sea, or was stolen by unscrupulous pirates. For whatever reason that the bell-buoy disappeared, its legacy lingered in the reef’s current name of ‘Bell Rock’. For the next four hundred-odd years, Bell Rock continued to claim more and more lives as ships sailed unknowingly over the reef, running aground on it and splitting open. Due to the local tides and the bad weather to be encountered in Scotland, the reef is often invisible, submerged beneath several feet of foaming sea-water, to appear only for a few hours each day for only a few months each year.

Bell Rock was proving more and more dangerous as the centuries rolled by. By the close of the 1700s, it was estimated that the rock claimed upwards of six ships every year. On a particularly bad night, up to seventy ships were lost in one storm alone!

Robert Stevenson was a young man at the close of the 18th century. Born in 1772, he was in his early thirties when in 1804, the HMS York, a huge, 64-gun warship, ran aground on Bell Rock. The waves smashed the ship to pieces, killing the entire crew onboard (nearly 500 men). The governing body whose job it was to approve the construction of warning-lights, the Northern Lighthouse Board, had been bombarded by Stevenson for years, to build a light on Bell Rock, but they had always refused him. It would be impossible to build a lighthouse under such dangerous conditions and it would cost far too much money! 42,684 pounds sterling and 8 shillings…and that’s in 1800s currency, unadjusted for inflation. The loss of the HMS York, one of the prides of the Royal Navy, however, forced the Board to reconsider. After much deliberation, approval for a lighthouse on Bell Rock was finally given in 1806.

Stevenson was probably estatic that he could now start building his lighthouse. With a solid grounding in civil engineering, Stevenson was sure that he could make a name for himself as the man who built a lighthouse on Bell Rock, one of the most hellish places on earth! But…it was not to be.

The Northern Lighthouse Board roped in Mr. John Rennie to design and build the lighthouse. Born in 1761, Rennie was considered Scotland’s most experienced and knowledgable civil engineer. He had built bridges and canals and dockyards. He had to be the best man for the job! Only, the Lighthouse board overlooked one crucial detail – Rennie had never built a lighthouse in his life! And now, he was going to have to build one on a handkerchief of land right in the middle of nature’s food-processor!

Luckily for the people building the Bell Rock Lighthouse, Rennie did not oversee construction, and neither were his plans for the lighthouse closely followed. In a stroke of good fortune, Robert Stevenson was selected to fill in the post of Resident Engineer (the position of Chief Engineer already taken by Rennie).

Designing the Light

Stevenson was meticulous in his construction of the Bell Rock Lighthouse. He didn’t need to be a sailor to know how dangerous the weather and the waters were, off the coast of Angus, Scotland. All he had to do was read the memorials and the countless newspaper-reports of the hundreds of ships and the thousands of lives that had been wrecked and lost on the rocks over the last century.

In designing the lighthouse, Stevenson examined the structure of other successful lighthouses, particularly the Eddystone Lighthouse, situated on the treacherous Eddystone Rocks, off the coast of Cornwall, England. He determined that the base of the lighthouse would have to be curved and sloped, so as to effectively deflect the force of any waves which would be slamming into the lighthouse every single day of the year. The lighthouse would also have to be extremely tall (over a hundred feet high!) to protect the all-important lamp at the top of the house, from being smashed to pieces by the force of the waves.


The third Eddystone Lighthouse (also called Smeaton’s Tower, named after John Smeaton, the civil engineer who designed it). It was this successful lighthouse (which, by the time it was dismantled and replaced in the 1870s, had stood for over a hundred years!) that Stevenson based his design on

Stevenson saw the designing and construction of the Bell Rock lighthouse as his project. It was, after all, he who had tried for so long to get permission to build a lighthouse there in the first place! To Stevenson, Rennie was nothing more than a helicopter schoolmaster, hovering over him all the time, checking on his work and generally being a nuisance. Although the two men corresponded frequently, with increasingly longer and more detailed letters as the lighthouse was constructed, Stevenson rarely took any of Rennie’s advice, preferring his own decisions and design-features instead.

Working on Bell Rock

Construction for the Bell Rock Lighthouse began on the 17th of August, 1807. In a series of small row-boats, Stevenson and thirty-five labourers set sail for Bell Rock from the district of Angus on the east coast of Scotland. The challenge ahead of them was great. Very great. To begin with, the window for working-time on Bell Rock was absolutely miniscule, and to follow up, the tide could change and swamp their work-site at a moment’s notice under sixteen feet (over four meters) of water in just minutes. Bell Rock was accessible by boat for only a few months each year in the summertime, and even then, only for four hours every day, at low tide! To maximise every single minute that nature allowed him and his men to work, Stevenson insisted that everyone was to work every single day of the week, including on the Sabbath Day (which is every Sunday in the modern calender), something that his highly religious work-crew was unwilling to do. After all, as the Ten Commandmants say: “Observe the Sabbath and Keep it Holy”. To Stevenson, however, religion had no place in a world of civil engineering.

Working on Bell Rock wasn’t just difficult because it was so darn inaccessible. Bell Rock itself was a right royal pain in the ass. Being part of a reef made up of extremely hard sandstone, and working only with hand-tools, Stevenson’s men found it almost impossible to chisel and pickaxe out a decent foundation on the Rock without beating their pickaxes to pieces! It was necessary to employ a blacksmith whose job it would be to set up shop on the Rock, working in freezing water, and to sharpen and resharpen all the pickaxe heads which were quickly blunted by the constant hammering into rock-solid sandstone. Using gunpowder (dynamite would not be invented for another seventy-odd years) to blast holes in the rock was impractical given the wet conditions of the building-site, and which could be extremely dangerous as well.

It was treacherous working on Bell Rock. To save time in going to and from the shore every single day to the Rock, Stevenson procured a ship and anchored it one mile away from the rock, out in the ocean. Each day, workers boarded the ship’s boats and rowed to Bell Rock. There, they would commence their two-hour shift of work. Ending work after two hours and heading for the boats was crucial. The rapidly rising tide could sweep the boats away and leave the men to drown. On one occasion, the second of September, 1807 this actually happened and it was only by very good fortune that Stevenson himself managed to escape with his life.

Work on the Bell Rock Lighthouse was, probably rather predictably, going along at a snail’s pace. The digging of the foundations took an extremely long time, being done entirely by hand…and the foundations that they were digging weren’t even for the lighthouse itself! Before construction of the lighthouse itself could begin, it was necessary to build the Beacon House. The Beacon House was a wooden tower which would serve as a temporary barracks for the men so that they would not have to constantly go back and forth from the ship all the time. It was three floors high, and stood on a framework of stilts, high above the waterline. It was finally completed in the middle of 1808.

Despite all of Stevenson’s coaxings, beggings and rationalisations, he could not convince his men that it would be a good idea to work on the Sabbath Day. They simply refused to do so. The incident of nearly drowning when their boats were washed off the Rock by the rising tide, was all the evidence that they needed, that God wanted them to down tools and chill out on a Saturday, like anyone else would want to do. This all changed in 1808.


A sketch showing the Bell Rock Lighthouse (right) and the temporary Beacon House (left), which housed the construction-workers during the summer months spent on Bell Rock

After leaving the half-completed Beacon House to the mercy of the North Sea, the men rowed and sailed away. Imagine their shock when they returned the following summer to discover that the Beacon House was still standing! Confidence in Stevenson’s engineering skills now firmly established, the men agreed to work seven days a week to complete the lighthouse on Bell Rock.

Building the Bell Rock Lighthouse

Bell Rock Lighthouse, Stevenson knew, would be unlike any other lighthouse then in existence. It would have to put up with fierce winter storms for most of the year, strong tides and waves for the rest of the year, and it would have to weather anything and everything that the North Sea could throw at it without collapsing. To ensure that his tower would stand the test of time, Stevenson constructed it out of highly durable Aberdeen Granite. Quarried from Rubislaw Quarry near the Scottish city of Aberdeen, this granite is famed the world-over for its incredible strength and this was the material that Stevenson was determined to build his tower with. The first stone for the construction of the actual lighthouse was laid on the 9th of July, 1808.

Over the next two years, construction continued at a very slow pace. By the end of 1808, only three courses (levels of stone) had been laid, bringing the lighthouse to a grand height of…six feet! As the tower grew higher, though, the risks of construction began to show. One man, Charles Henderson, was killed when he fell out of the Beacon House during a storm. Another man named Wishart was crippled for life when the arm of one of the cranes fell from the top of the tower, smashing his legs, leaving him unable to work or walk properly for the rest of his life. All the details of daily construction were recorded by Stevenson in his diaries, letters and journals and he wrote ‘Account of the Bell Rock Light-house’ in 1824, chronicling his experiences working on the crowning achievement of his profession.

In 1809, John Rennie (remember him? The guy who was the Chief Engineer and pinched Stevenson’s dream job?) made the second of only two trips to Bell Rock to examine construction; the first trip he made was in 1808 to witness the laying of the lighthouse’s foundation-stone. By now, both Rennie and Stevenson were quite sick of each other. Stevenson saw Rennie as nothing but an interfering buzzard, and, to prevent him from coming to the Rock again, Stevenson kept Rennie swamped by dozens and dozens of letters, asking for his ‘advice’ on how to build the tower. The letters were long and incredibly detailed. They asked everything from what kinds of locks to use on the doors, what type of putty to use for the window-glass, what size and shape the windows should be and so-on. In all, Stevenson sent Rennie eighty-two letters! And Rennie replied to almost every one. But Stevenson just ignored them.

By 1810, the tower was completed. It had cost two men their lives and one man the ability to walk unaided (among other injuries which the men suffered), but the tower was complete! A total of twenty-four powerful oil-lamps were installed in the light at the top of the tower. These lamps were based on a design by French scientist Aime Argand (1750-1803). Unlike conventional, round, spherical oil-lamps, Argand’s lamps were cylindrical in shape.


A typical, tabletop Argand lamp. The lamps used for the Bell Rock Lighthouse were modelled after these

While most lamps just had glass windows to protect the flame, or bulbous, spherical chimneys, again to protect the flame, that was all that these chimneys and windows did. Argand’s lamp, with its cylindrical chimney, had the effect of giving more illumination-power than a regular lamp, as well as protecting the flame from gusts of wind. This was achieved because the tubular shape of the lamp magnified the light output from the burning oil-flame, concentrating it and making it appear brighter. Twenty four, extra-large Argand lamps were installed in the Bell Rock Lighthouse, and both clear and red-tinted glass sheets were placed around the outside of the tower’s light in which these lamps were housed. The result was that at night, when the lamps were lit and the light was set in motion, ships at sea would see an alternating red-and-white flash of light, warning them of the presence of the Bell Rock Lighthouse and the dangerous coastline that it protected.

The Completion of the Lighthouse

The lighthouse was finally completed in 1810, with a total of 2,500 specially-cut blocks of Aberdeen granite going into its construction, each one of these stones delivered to the docks by the same horse from 1808-1810. Its name was Bassey. In the closing months of the lighthouse’s construction, the tower became something of a tourist attraction. Locals and travellers would hire boats and row the twelve miles out to sea, to witness its construction.


A computer-generated image of the Bell Rock Lighthouse as it would have looked immediately after the completion of its construction in 1811

On the 1st of February, 1811, the lighthouse was lit and operated for the first time. In an agreement with Stevenson, made during the lighthouse’s construction, the workman Wishart, who had been crippled by the falling crane, was appointed the lighthouse’s first keeper. Having worked so hard on the lighthouse and having been rendered unfit for most other jobs, Wishart was ideally suited to becoming the first keeper of the Bell Rock Lighthouse.


An artist’s rendition of the Bell Rock Lighthouse in the middle of a fierce, North Sea storm

The Bell Rock Lighthouse stands to this day, a testament to man’s engineering skill. Untouched for over two hundred years (apart from periodic maintenance of the tower’s light), the Bell Rock Lighthouse continues to warn local shipping of the threat posed by the Inchcape, or the reef at Bell Rock.


Bell Rock Lighthouse as it appears today

While there were still disputes for decades after, between Rennie and Stevenson over who should take credit for the lighthouse’s phenomenal design, there can be no doubt that it was Robert Stevenson who built her from the ground up, risking every day of his life on Bell Rock to see his dream come true. Risking death by falling masonry, death by drowning, death by the stormy conditions to be found in that part of the world.

Bell Rock Lighthouse today at low tide. Note the small area of land which the labourers would have had to have worked on. Also, compare this photograph with the one above, showing the extreme difference in water-depth between high and low tide. Failure to get into the boats at the end of each two-hour shift would have resulted in all men drowning within a matter of minutes, as the water washed over their heads.

Robert Stevenson did make a name for himself with Bell Rock. His civil engineering skills were recognised and he went on to design and construct fourteen more lighthouses, along with five bridges! His sons, Thomas, Alan and David Stevenson all went on to become successful civil engineers in their own right. Although Robert Stevenson was famous for building one of the strongest and most robust lighthouses in the world in one of the most hellish places on earth, today, most people would probably remember him for another reason. In November, 1850, the year that Robert Stevenson died, at the very respectable age of seventy-eight, Margaret Isabella Balfour (later, Stevenson) and Thomas Stevenson, Robert’s son, welcomed a new baby boy into the world. A boy who would eventually grow up to be even more famous than his civil-engineer grandfather who brought safety to the East Scottish coast, more famous than his father or either of his uncles. A boy who is still very well-known to this day, over a hundred years after he died.

That boy was Robert…Louis…Stevenson. The famous children’s author, who gave us such famous novels as ‘Treasure Island’, ‘Kidnapped’ and ‘Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde’.

 
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‘The Underland Route’ or the History of the Subway

In the 1860s in the years during and after the American Civil War, two railroad companies completed America’s first transcontinental railroad, colloquially called the “Overland Route”. This cut down the travel-time from cities such as Chicago in the East, to Los Angeles and San Francisco in the West, from several weeks or even months by wagon-train…to a few days by steam-powered locomotive. Instead of stocking up on rifles and muskets, provisions and supplies…a person could pack his steamer-trunk or suitcase, buy a ticket and ride the rails in what was then a fast, comfortable and convenient way to travel.

Around the same time that the Americans completed their “overland route”, a hop across the pond called the Atlantic Ocean to England would see the British people’s first…”underland route”…and the birth of the modern subway system.

The London Underground: The World’s First Subway

The London Underground (more commonly called ‘The Underground’ or ‘The Tube’ today), is the world’s oldest and is one of the world’s largest subway systems. It’s famous all over the world for its stations, its red, white and blue logo or ’roundel’ and the similiarly-coloured, tubular railway carriages. It’s famous for being used as air-raid shelters during the Second World War and for appearing in a James Bond movie where an invisible Aston Martin is delivered to Bond on a flatbed railway carriage.

Beneath all this fame and glory and fortune, people tend to forget that the London Underground is the world’s first and oldest underground railroad and is now nearly a hundred and fifty years old and still running. The story of the London Underground is the story of the development of the modern subway system and the story of one is generally entwined with the other.

The Need to go Under

Subway systems are not built for their novelty aspect or because “they can”. In each particular city where a subway exists, there are reasons for their construction. But what was it that led to the whole idea of the “under ground” railroad to begin with?

To understand this, we must flashback to London in the 1850s and 60s. Here, we meet a city which is the center of an empire, which is increasing in population every day due to the vast changes brought on by the Industrial Revolution and which is suffering the consequences of such rapid population-growth…traffic congestion.

By the 1850s, railroads were fast becoming the most popular way to move around. It was quick, comfortable and convenient. While cities had several large railroad stations for big, main train-lines, the problem was that once passengers arrived in town, they clogged up the roads with horse-drawn carriages and taxi-cabs. It was reasoned that if there were trains right in the heart of town, they would be able to move people around more effectively and cut down on congestion. This wasn’t easy in a city as old as London, though. Railroad lines took up a lot of space and with congestion as bad as it was, threading railroad lines all over the road was hardly the best solution. Instead, it was decided that the best method of getting trains into the city was to go underground. It would be relatively easy to follow the roads, stops and stations could be easily planned and it would provide valuable employment to the thousands of unemployed people living in London in the second half of the 19th Century.

The First Subway

The first part of the first subway, the London Underground, was born in 1863 as the Metropolitan Railway and stretched from Paddington Station north to Farringdon Station, via King’s Cross. The man responsible for this new, quite literally groundbreaking task of an ‘under ground’ railroad was Charles Pearson, a London lawyer and Member of Parliament. Throughout the 1830s, 40s and 50s, Pearson had campaigned for an ‘underground railroad’ to help ease the increasing traffic congestion in central London during the mid-19th century. After numerous government meetings, debates and discussions, an act of Parliament was passed for the construction of the first stage of what would become the world’s first subway system.


The Metropolitan Railway under construction near King’s Cross Station; February, 1861

To make things easy, the Metropolitan Railway was constructed using the ‘cut-and-cover’ method of tunnel-construction. This involves digging a huge trench in the middle of the street, right down to the level where the railroad lines would go. The rail-lines would be laid and the tunnel walls and roof would be built above it. Once the roof was completed, the excavated rubble and soil was dumped back over the top to reform the original roadway, giving the process its name of ‘cut and cover’. While relatively easy, safe and quick to carry out, Pearson probably won himself a great deal of enemies by building his railroad this way – the Cut and Cover method meant that entire roads and city blocks had to be shut down for construction-purposes. Building the railroad took nearly three years, from February, 1860 – January, 1863. Unfortunately, Pearson wouldn’t live to see his masterpiece open for operation; he would die on the 14th of September, 1862, of dropsy. He was 68 years old.

Underground Trains

Having built the subway, it was now necessary to get trains into it. Obviously, conventional steam-trains were out of the question. They were huge, bulky, noisy digusting things, far too unsuitable for subway tunnels. Instead, an entirely new form of railroad locomotive had to be invented. While still coal-fired, steam-powered engines, these new machines were significantly smaller than their above-ground counterparts.


Metropolitan Railway A-Class subway locomotive. Engine #23 was made in 1864

The steam-engines developed for the London Underground were compact, fat, low-profiled tank-engines. Despite the obvious problems of smoke and steam from these newly designed machines, the London Underground proved popular with Victorians. Nearly 27,000 passengers were using the Metropolitan Railway within the first few months of its opening in January of 1863.

Electrification of Subways

It’s hard to imagine that from the 1860s until the early 1900s, the world’s first, oldest and at the time, biggest subway system, was pulled along using nothing but steam-power. In the crowded, cramped and claustrophobic environment of the London Underground, steam-power was hardly ideal. In fact, it was very uncomfortable riding in the Underground during this period and adequate ventilation had to be installed if the Underground was to maintain a practical, working public service for the people of London. Electrification of the Underground was proposed as early as 1880, but it wasn’t until about 1905 that electrical technology and understanding had progressed far enough to make this a practicality. Starting in the early 20th century, many of the original steam-trains that pulled carriages through the Undergorund were scrapped and replaced by modern, electrically-powered locomotives. Very few of the original Underground steam-locomotives from the 1860s and 70s survive today.

Under and Outwards

With the initial success of the original Metropolitan Railway, other underground railroad companies sprang up, almost overnight. Throughout the second half of the 1800s and the early 1900s, private companies dug and developed their own subway lines throughout London. As the 20th century progressed, the subway became more and more familiar and important to London. By the end of WWI, England had over a hundred big and small railroad companies. In the end, many of these were merged together with the Railways Act of 1921. Nationalisation of the railway system was completed in 1947 with the Transport Act. By the Second World War, the London Underground had grown immensely. By the early 1940s, there were many abandoned stations and stretches of the Underground which were never completed, due to a lack of money or a lack of necessity. Stations that were too close together were considered unnecessary and were closed down. Many of these were converted to air-raid shelters during The Blitz. Many of these stations still exist today and some are set aside specifically for filming-purposes by film-production companies, so that the actual London Underground won’t be disrupted by camera-crews and actors.

The Subway Goes Global

After the success of the London Underground, the subway began to spread around the world. The next subway opened in Glasgow, Scotland in 1891. The first American subway was opened in Boston, Massachusetts in 1897! The New York City Subway system was started in 1904. Previous to this, New York City had been serviced by its famous elevated railroad (commonly called the ‘El’). A horrific blizzard in 1888 dumped several feet of snow all over New York, which brought its above-ground train-service to a screeching halt.


Manhattan’s famous elevated railroad. Started in the 1860s, it lasted until the 1960s when it was gradually destructed. This photo was taken in 1944. The affect of heavy winter snowfalls on the New York elevated railroad was what prompted the construction of the now, world-famous New York City Subway in 1904

To prevent a repeat of this, the New York City Subway was constructed. Subways continue to be popular in countries where snow can affect above-ground railroad traffic, such as in Russia, Germany and Canada. While today subways are seen as modern, bright, fast and wonderful, or at times, a pain in the ass when your train comes late or it’s cramped or overcrowded, remember that they were born in an age of steam and steel, bricks, mortar and feverish industrial revolution.