The coal-fired Wee Cumbrae Lighthouse, built 400-feet above sea level in 1757 by

James Ewing

CLYDE LIGHTHOUSE TRUST 1755 - 1965

For a relatively small service, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust more than punched its weight in
innovation, it the first lighthouse authority in Great Britain or Ireland to be allowed to build
lighthouses and to collect light dues for their maintenance and, in conjunction with the
brilliant Stevenson firm of lighthouse civil engineers, its trustees and engineers developing
the very first lit flashing buoy; the very first radio controlled automatic fog gun, the very first
synchronisation of radio and sound signals, the first equiangular prism, the very first
economical use of the silver-backed glass mirror system, the first fog horn installation in
Britain with a regular designated characteristic and the first diaphone fog signals and first
electric buoys in Europe.

What follows here is essentially 'an expansion of the detail' in an article by Hector Mackenzie
in the 2006 Newsletter (4th Quarter, Volume 4, Issue 4) of The World Lighthouse Society
http://www.fyr.org/Pdffiler/4thqtr2006newsletter.pdf

The addition and 'expansion' of this article is felt warranted on the grounds that much history
is lost when, by reason of 'space limitations' on many websites, often dictated by by the
rising costs of 'bandwidth' charges etc., newsletters, particularly and other 'important to
some' webpages are deleted, the scribd 'archives' and the pages of the websites associated
with the uploads here, regularly trawled by 'The Internet Archive'
http://www.archive.org/web/web.php which, operating since 1996, has managed to preserve
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much valuable material which otherwise would have been lost to future researchers as many
websites disappeared without trace after only a short life in 'cyberspace'.

The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust, set up in 1755 by an Act of Parliament, was the first public
body to be established in Great Britain for the express purpose of erecting and maintaining
lighthouses, beacons and buoyage and to collect light dues, these also to pay for the removal
of shoals for the improvement of navigation below Greenock and any surplus of dues to be
retained to provide equipment for Greenock Harbour and to improve the river above Greenock,
in 1781, the constitution of The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust was revised by Parliament and
the authority became known as The Clyde Lighthouses Trust (CLT).

Interestingly, at the time The Cumbrae Lighthouses Trust was set up, thirty years before The
Scottish and Irish Lighthouse Boards were instituted, Trinity House had the right to erect
seamarks but did not then have the power to collect dues for their maintenance.

In 1757, James Ewing built the new trust's Wee (or Little) Cumbrae lighthouse 400-feet above
sea level, on what was later named Lighthouse Hill, the cost, £140 5 shillings and 8 pence,
considered low. The lighthouse tower a circular stone structure standing 28 feet high, with an
external diameter of 18½ feet and its internal diameter 12½ feet, the lighthouse keepers
accommodated in a cottage about thirty feet north of the tower.

Coal, for the open fire in a grate at the top of the tower, came from pits near Cambuslang
and was brought by horse and cart to Irvine and then sent by boat to the island, the coal
burning so fiercely that the fire-grate had to be replaced after only one year and it then
replaced regularly thereafter.

The Act of Parliament which gave The 'Cumray' Lighthouse Trust the right to levy a charge of
one penny sterling per tonne for every British ship on a foreign voyage (excluding His
Majesty’s warships) and two pence sterling per tonne from any foreign vessels which passed
the light, one half-penny per ton being charged on 'home traders' over 30 tons and up to two
pence per ton on 'home traders' of between 15 and 30 tons, the light dues were to prove very
profitable and, in March 1773, the dues from the light were used to pay for the quelling of a
mob of sailors who had brought business to a halt in Greenock and Port Glasgow for ten days.

The inherent limits of coal-fired lights, combined with the tower's position on top of a hill,
meant that The Wee Cumbrae light was often obscured by cloud or fog and complaints from
seamen led to a plan in 1790 to replace the light in the tower with another tower nearer the
coast and, in 1793, Thomas Smith and Robert Stevenson, grand-father of Robert Louis
Stevenson, completed the new lighthouse installation on the west of the island, The New
Tower, 36 feet high and of unpainted stone, fitted with the new 'catoptrics' lighting system
having 32 oil lamps and silvered glass reflectors and using mirrors, rather than lenses.

In 1826 the illumination was upgraded to 15 argon lamps and the new lighthouse also
equipped with a foghorn, slipway, jetty and boathouse.

Increasing traffic into the Clyde ports and surpluses from the light dues allowed The Trustees
to build The Cloch Lighthouse, in 1797 and then one at Toward Point, in 1812, the year when
Henry Bell's steamboat, the "Comet", first appeared, both lighthouses lit with oil lamps and
reflectors.

Though The Clyde Lighthouses Trust was not involved in the developments of the new French
'dioptric' system, the developments largely done by French and English glassmakers and The
Northern Lighthouse Board, these optics were installed at both Cloch and Cumbrae and the
lights upgraded and fuelled by acetylene when they became available.

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Built around the end of the 1880's, the Garroch Head Light, known to as. Rubh'an Eun, at the
eastern point of Glencallum Bay on Bute, an automatic lighthouse on the opposite side of The
Cumbrae Channel from The Wee Cumbrae Lighthouse, had a lens of 1330 mm focal distance,
with prisms made of equiangular section, installed, the equiangular prisms designed by the
Stevenson lighthouse engineers to give a greater brilliancy of light up and down the narrow
channel and no other such unmanned light anywhere having a lens with such a focal length.

In 1930 The Trustees installed a more powerful light at Toward Lighthouse, the Stevensons
recommending a new departure, large parabolic, silver-backed, glass mirrors being installed
with a focal length of 1000 mm, the new glass mirrors gave a brilliant light for less than a
third of the cost of a lens and the mirrors at Toward giving a more powerful light than a
dioptric lens of identical area and using an identical light source.

Unlike the metal and glass mirrors of old, which were plated on the surface with silver,
rhodium or aluminium, Toward's mirrors were easily kept clean and polished and were
resistant to scratching.

Whilst the prisms in a dioptric apparatus could not be adjusted after factory testing, the big
advantage of the mirrors was
the fact that they could be adjusted accurately at the time of installation, by taking
observations from the sea..

The silver-backed glass mirror system was later taken up by the French and to some extent by
The Northern Lighthouse Board and The Commissioners of Irish Lights, most stations having
lenses which did not need to be replaced and the Toward's mirror system was later installed in
e.g. the Tusker Rock, Girdleness, Rona and Langness, on The Isle of Man, lighthouses.

The Clyde was the first estuary and river anywhere in The World to be lit by buoys and
beacons, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust first establishing an offshore gas light at Port Glasgow
Perch in 1861, the fixed light expensive to run and requiring frequent attendance and The
Trust eventually solving the problem of lighting buoys in 1880 when they laid a buoy at
Roseneath Patch, the very first in The World to use oil gas, which could be compressed
without too much risk and, thanks to The Trustees' innovation, thousands of these similarly lit
buoys soon in use worldwide and The Trustees again leading the way with a European first
when they introduced American-designed electrically lit buoys on The Clyde in 1933.

The Trustees too installed what is understood to be the first fog signal in Britain at Cumbrae
Lighthouse in 1865, ten years before the first fog signal installed by The Northern Lighthouse
Board, the compressed air generated by a coal-fired Ericsson caloric (hot air) engine, a fog
signal later installed at Kempock Point and The Trustees trying out whistles of different
pitches, one sounding after another, at The Cloch Lighthouse.

The first automated steam-powered foghorn was invented by Robert Foulis (May 5, 1796 -
January 28, 1866) who, born in Glasgow, emigrated to Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1818,
following the death of his first wife in childbirth, Foulis noted as inventor, civil engineer and
artist.

Settling in Saint John, Foulis was appointed deputy land surveyor in 1822 and, after surveying
the upper Saint John River for the feasibility of steam shipping, he became involved with the
buildings of several early steamboats and the first Saint John harbour ferry.

Foulis founded the province's first iron foundry in 1825 and a school of arts in 1838 and later
patented a gas light apparatus that was later used in lighthouses and, thanks to his daughter,

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invented a steam-powered foghorn whose paternity was disputed between himself and the
government of New Brunswick.

Foulis is said to walking home on a foggy night and heard his daughter playing the piano in the
distance and, noticing that the low notes were more audible than the higher notes, he then
designed a device to produce a low-frequency sound, as well as a code system for use with it,
Foulis believing his invention could reduce the number of ships colliding and grounding in
foggy weather..

After repeated representations to The New Brunswick legislature, Foulis's fog signal was
installed on Partridge Island in 1859 by a T. T. Vernon-Smith, Foulis himself involved in legal
battles over his invention for the remainder of his life due to business ventures of varying
success and his failure at patenting his foghorn, Foulis dying in poverty and Daboll and his
'Fog Trumpet' prospering.

The United States Lighthouse Service, which was put on a proper footing in 1852, was in the
forefront of developing sound fog signals that were regular and of a designated characteristic.

The book 'A Short History of The Clyde Lighthouses Trust' relates the story of the Trust's
decision to use a system invented by an American, the Daboll trumpet, he, having been paid
£600 he came over from New York, installed his equipment at Cumbrae, where it was said to
have worked very well, the American-published 'Harper's Weekly', of January 16, 1864 then
noting that, on November 17, 1863, The Trinity House Commissioners, following successful
trials of Daboll's 'Fog Trumpet' that day at Dungeness Lighthouse, had decided to purchase
his equipment.

A Daboll trumpet is an air trumpet foghorn which had been developed by an American,
Celadon Leeds Daboll of New London, Connecticut. It was basically a small coal-fired hot air
engine, which compressed air in a cylinder on top of which was a reed horn.

The Daboll trumpet, consists of a steel reed vibrating within a horn, which uses the hot air
engine to force cold air by means of an air pump into a boiler, from which it escapes into the
horn through a valve, causing the vibrations of the
reed, which are regulated by an automatic cam.

The "Scientific American" magazine's supplement, Vol. XIX, No. 470, January 3, 1885 tells us
that, "The Daboll trumpet was invented by Mr. C. L. Daboll of Connecticut, who was
experimenting to meet the announced wants of The United States Lighthouse Board.

"The largest consists of a huge trumpet seventeen feet long, with a throat three and one-half
inches in diameter and a flaring mouth thirty-eight inches across.

"In the trumpet is a resounding cavity and a tongue-like steel reed ten inches long, two and
three-quarter inches wide, one inch thick at its fixed end and half that at its free end.

"Air is condensed in a reservoir and driven through the trumpet by hot air or steam machinery
at a pressure of from fifteen to twenty pounds and is capable of making a shriek which can be
heard at a great distance for a certain number of seconds each minute, by about one-quarter
of the power expended in the case of the whistle.

"In all Daboll's experiments against and at right angles and at other angles to the wind, the
trumpet stood first and the whistle came next in power.

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"In the trial of the relative power of various instruments made by General Duane in 1874, the
twelve-inch whistle was reported as exceeding the first-class Daboll trumpet. Beaseley reports
that the trumpet has done good work at various British stations, making itself heard from five
to ten miles.

"The engineer in charge of the lighthouses of Canada says, "The expense for repairs and the
frequent stoppages to make these repairs during the four years they continued in use, made
the trumpets expensive and unreliable.

"The frequent stoppages during foggy weather made them sources of danger instead of aids
to navigation. The sound of these trumpets has deteriorated during the last year or so".

"General Duane, reporting as to his experiments in 1881, says, "The Daboll trumpet,
operated by a caloric engine, should only be employed in exceptional cases, such as at
stations where no water can be procured and where from the proximity of other signals it may
be necessary to vary the nature of the sound".

"Thus it would seem that the Daboll trumpet is an exceptionally fine instrument, producing a
sound of great penetration and of sufficient power for ordinary practical use, but that to be
kept going it requires skillful management and constant care".

The Cumbrae fog signal was upgraded in 1922 with the then most powerful diaphone in the
country, the channel there not much more than a mile wide and, with the general speed of
passing vessels of the day, it having a very short interval between the groups of blasts, in the
book 'A Short History of The Clyde Lighthouses Trust', the (1956) Cumbrae foghorn is
described as, 'Diaphone foghorn operated by compressed air, furnished by engines of 60 hp,
giving a signal of three 1½ second blasts and two 1½ second blasts alternately every 35 secs'.

Again it was a first for Britain, trials of the diaphone in Ireland not adopted and the success of
the Cumbrae installation leading quickly to other diaphone installations around Britain and
Europe, the principle of the diaphone essentially a British invention, for church organs.

The diaphone horn was based directly on the organ stop of the same name invented by Robert
Hope-Jones, creator of the Wurlitzer organ and too of the 'Tibia Clausa', the staple of the
cinema organ sound.

Hope-Jones' design, based on the vibrations in air created by a slotted piston moving within a
correspondingly slotted cylinder, was adapted and patented by Professor John Pell Northey of
Toronto University, who added a secondary compressed air supply to the piston to power it on
both forward and reverse strokes and create an even more powerful sound, the entire horn
apparatus was driven by a compressor.

To manufacture the new equipment, Northey set up The Diaphone Signal Co. at Toronto in
1903. It manufactured a range
of diaphone models, the large "Type F", which created a tone of about 250 Hertz, found
worldwide use as a fog signal, especially in lighthouses. The mechanism of the diaphone
created a noticeable low-frequency "grunt" at the end of each note produced, caused by the
speed of the piston reducing as the air supply was cut. As this low-frequency sound could
carry further, Northey's son Rodney redesigned the "Type F" model to sustain the second low
tone, creating the familiar two-tone fog signal which was commonly used in light houses and
light vessels in the United States and Canada, installations in Europe generally using single-
tone diaphones

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The European manufacturing rights were obtained by Chance Brothers of Birmingham in the
United Kingdom, already a major supplier of 'fresnel lenses' and other equipment to
lighthouse authorities.

New, slow running, oil engines, started by heating with acetylene, rather than the more
usual blow lamp method, were installed for the fog signals, the engines taking quite a long
time to start up but also matched with numerous large compressed air receivers to allow
instant start up of the fog signals.

Later, Toward was given a reed-type fog signal, with Kelvin diesel engines to drive the
compressors and the Cloch's original siren-type fog signal was replaced with a diaphone, the
residents of Dunoon little amused !

Uniquely, the Cloch's compressors were later to be driven by small gas turbines and the
Cumbrae's compressors driven by large Rolls Royce diesel engines, all very innovative.

In 1914, forerunners in the field, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust introduced radio control, the
application of radio at that time confined to Morse code telegraphy and The Trust using radio
for the first time to perform mechanical functions, operating valves from a distance by radio
impulses and placing a new, unmanned, fog signal on a pile structure at Roseneath Patch,
Marconi engineers building the necessary radio equipment to The Trust's own engineers'
design and the signal operated from Greenock, over a mile away, The Northern Lighthouse
Board and the French and United States Lighthouse Services followed in the steps of the little
Clyde Lighthouse Service in the use of this new technology.

The distortion of sound, particularly in fog, makes it very difficult for a mariner to judge
direction from a fog signal and ships having difficulty obtaining sufficient accuracy from cross
bearings from the four DF radio beacons then operated by The Northern Lighthouse Board,
three of the four NLB beacons far away and all having to send signals across land to be picked
up in the entrance to The Clyde, the speed and number of vessels in the estuary making it too
risky to rely on these cross bearings, not least as the bearings from any two DF stations could
not be taken at the same time, The Clyde Lighthouses Trust were also first to introduce
'talking beacons', the Cumbrae's fog signals synchronised with radio signals, to allow safer
passage through the narrow Cumbrae Channel, the problem resolved by 1929, an automatic
radio broadcast gave the name of the fog station and a signal, synchronised with the blasts of
the fog signal, then enabled the listener to count of the distance between his position and
that of the fog station.

The fog signals synchronised with the radio signals, one simply notes the second hand time
when one hears the radio signal and then again when one hears the actual fog signal, the
time difference is noted and the distance calculated on the basis of sound travelling through
the air at the rate of one nautical mile in 5.5 seconds and thus, simply divide the time
distance by 5.5 for the 'distance off' in nautical miles, or by 5.0 for the 'distance off' in statute
(land) miles.

This new invention was quickly adopted by The United States Lighthouse Service and installed
at over 100 stations, the Americans preferring to use telegraphy rather than telephony and
the 'talking' unique to The Clyde beacons, the last 'talking' beacon installed at The Cloch
Lighthouse in 1939 and, The British Royal Society of Arts, with representatives of Trinity
House and Admiralty amongst the judges, deciding that the Stevenson 'Talking Beacon' was
the most valuable navigation invention of its time, the beacons remaining in service until
automation of both the Cumbrae and Cloch lighthouses' equipment.

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On January 1, 1966, the interests of The Clyde Lighthouses Trust, Clyde Navigation Trust,
their old boundary a line across The Clyde from Newark Castle to the mouth of the Cardross
Burn and Greenock Harbour Trust were merged under the banner of the newly created Clyde
Port Authority, a self-governing public trust port operating under its own Acts of Parliament,
its board including non-executive members appointed by The Secretary of State for Transport,
the new body having jurisdiction over an area of some 450 square miles of water, from
Glasgow's Albert Bridge in Glasgow to a line drawn some fifty miles away, between Corrygills
Point on the Isle of Arran and Gailes on the Ayrshire Coast, the authority having responsibility
for the main navigable channel, lighting, buoys and the provision of harbour facilities at
Glasgow, Greenock, Ardrossan, which came into the new body's control in 1968 and
Hunterston's Ore and Coal Terminal, which opened in 1979, the Cumbrae, Toward and Cloch
lighthouses soon being automated and The Clyde Port Authority being privatised in 1992, it
later acquired by its management and employees and becoming known as 'Clydeport', it in
turn becoming a wholly owned subsidiary of Peel Holdings plc in January 2003.

Today only Toward's lighthouse, once regarded as the least important of the three manned
stations, has a light in the original lantern albeit from a sealed beam array, the Cloch
lighthouse has only a small 'Tideland' type flasher on its tower balcony, its tower and adjacent
houses protected by The National Trust for Scotland - The 1792 tower and keepers' houses at
Cumbrae, now unused, have been sold into private ownership and the navigation light is now
placed where the old fog horns were situated.

The Clyde Lighthouses Trust's beloved the twin-screw "Torch" which serviced the the buoys
and lighthouses of The Clyde, north of The Wee Cumbrae and The Garroch Head and which,
once a year, on her 'Annual Inspection of Lights' cruise, called at Wemyss Bay to pick up the
VIP's, including the then Clyde Trust's secretary Alex Stevens, who stayed in Skelmorlie.

Built by The Ailsa Shipbuilding Company's Ayr Shipyard as Yard No 387 and registered in
Glasgow, the 329 gross, 117 net ton, 137' x 27' x 10' draught, "Torch" was launched on
Friday, May 16, 1924 and given twin steam compound engines - Transferred to The Clyde
Port Authority on January 1, 1966, the "Torch" was eventually sold for scrapping in March
1978 and scrapped at Dalmuir in early 1980, one of her engines carefully removed for
preservation purposes and given to The Scottish Maritime Museum
http://www.scottishmaritimemuseum.org/

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The 'No 1' pilot cutter "Cumbrae", with her two masts and tall yellow funnel and more like a
steam yacht of days gone by, was a familiar sight in The Cumbrae Channel, was launched at
George Brown & Company Greenock's yard on Thursday, October 15, 1936 as Yard No. 199,
her Official Number 164103. Of 101 gross register tons and 36 net registered tons, she was
90' 2" in length, 19' 9" beam and had a draught of 8½ feet. Her single screw, powered
originally by a British Polar 2SA 5 cylinder, 325 bhp diesel engine, giving her a speed of 10½
knots, was replaced with a 400 bhp British Polar M 5 cylinder 2SA in 1957, her speed
unchanged.

Owned by The Clyde Pilotage Trust, the "Cumbrae" was sold off in 1974 to Marine Oil Industry
Response Ltd., managed by Raymond Hart in London, who converted her to 'cargo use' and
renamed her "Orrin", then sold on the following year, in 1975, to Metal Recoveries
(Newhaven) Ltd., her status today unrecorded.