What is a lighthouse?

It is a tower with a bright light at the top, located at an important or dangerous place regarding navigation (travel over water). The two main purposes of a lighthouse are to serve as a navigational aid and to warn boats of dangerous areas. It is like a traffic sign on the sea. What a seeing-eye dog is to a blind person is what a lighthouse is to a seaman.

Do all lighthouses look alike?

Although we often think of a lighthouse as a tall, white conical tower, there are many, many variations of design. Depending on its location, it might be tall (where the land was very flat) or short and squat (where there was a high cliff or rocky coast). It could be square, octagonal (with eight sides), conical (like an ice cream cone upside down), cylindrical (like a very fat pipe), or even like a skeleton.

Tall, conical light (Pensacola, FL);		Round caisson/sparkplug light (Duxbury, MA)		Round caisson/sparkplug light (Duxbury, MA)

Lighthouse also come in different shapes and sizes…

Octagonal (8 sides) (Sandy Hook, NJ)		Cylindrical (Point Arena, CA)		Skeletal (Boca Grande, FL)		Conical (Currituck, NC)

Square Big Bay, MI

You might find the lighthouse standing alone, attached to the building where the lighthouse keeper lives, or connected to the keeper’s quarters by an enclosed walkway. Sometimes the lantern room is built into the roof of the keeper’s house.

When the lighthouses were built, they were constructed with whatever materials were most readily available. They were designed to fit the local geographic and climatic conditions. Some are made of stone; others brick, concrete, wood, steel, cast iron, and even tabby (a mixture of shells, lime, sand and water). So you can see that each lighthouse is very unique.