Society members have been sharing their favorite images for the Society’s 2018 Calendar contest. One of the more unusual interior images was submitted by Henry Harding who wrote,
This is a unique feature to be found in a lighthouse. It is a Telegraph Room and is in the Great Orme Lighthouse near Llandudno Wales. It is not an electrical telegraph, but a Semaphore Telegraph. In the windows you can see green plugs in spherical gimbals. The gimbals are for the telescopes so the operator could see the next telegraph station and interpret what the semaphore message was saying. They then would copy what they saw to confirm what was being transmitted to the previous station. Of course when they put that up, the next station would see the new message and copy back to this station. This particular system passed messages from Liverpool to Holyhead (pronounced Hollyhead). They could send messages in a matter of minutes even though there were ten stations to this system. The first Semaphore Telegraph System was developed in France in 1790. This one was developed around 1840.
The lantern room in the Great Orme Lighthouse is on the first floor below the windows of this room. It contained a 1st Order Fresnel. The lens is currently in a small museum on top of the Great Orme. There is a Cable Car which runs out of Llandudno directly to that small museum. There also is shopping at another building there as well. It is a fun trip.
For more on the Great Orme Lighthouse see http://www.lighthouse-llandudno.co.uk/. The deadline for submission in this Friday, September 15. For more information on submitting, see https://uslhs.wordpress.com/photos/.
Submitted by Candace Clifford, September 12, 2017
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U.S. Lighthouse Society News is produced by the U.S. Lighthouse Society to support lighthouse preservation, history, education and research. Please join the U.S. Lighthouse Society if you are not already a member. If you have items of interest to the lighthouse community and its supporters, please email them to candace@uslhs.org.
Candace was the US Lighthouse Society historian from 2016 until she passed away in August 2018. For 30 years, her work involved lighthouse history. She worked with the National Park Service and the Council of American Maritime Museums. She was a noted author and was considered the most knowledgable person on lighthouse information at the National Archives. Books by Candace Clifford include: Women who Kept the Lights: a History of Thirty-eight Female Lighthouse Keepers , Mind the Light Katie, and Maine Lighthouses, Documentation of their Past.