Lighthouse Travel Research--The Inadequacies of Written Description

 

I fell in love during my research trip. Not with Roland, which was already a given. No, I fell in love with the Fresnel lenses still in use in some lighthouses today.¹

Fresnel lenses are not lights themselves but are made up of hundreds of pieces of specially cut glass surrounding a lamp. Their role is to reflect and magnify the light shining inside, making it visible for miles. And they are beautiful.

The closest I can come to showing you their beauty is to provide some photographs, but even those are woefully inadequate. The photo at the top of this page is a 4^th Order lens in the museum at Beavertail Light in Rhode Island.

Fresnel lenses are graded by size, with 1^st Order lenses beging the largest and 6^th Order lenses the smallest, as you can see in the second photo. I have never seen a 1^st Order lens, which is big enough for a man to walk inside, but we did see a 2^nd Order lens at the Maine Lighthouse Museum in Rockland. That’s the third photo.

The remaining two lenses are shown in their natural habitats. The fourth photo is the Sixth Order lens at Rose Island Light in Rhode Island, where we got to climb to the lantern room. The final is another 4^th Order lens, this time seen from below at Pemaquid Point Lighthouse in Maine.

But the question I’m posing in this post, and the one I’m struggling with right now, is how to describe the indescribable. Even the photos don’t do Fresnel lenses justice, so words never will. Still, there are times when a writer has to try. Here is my poor attempt to show my protagonist’s reaction the first time she climbs the tower and sees the lens.

Jessie couldn’t stop staring at the shimmering glass object in the center of the room. Beehive-shaped and almost as tall as Dad, it was prettier than any jewel she had ever seen.

“Is that the light?” she asked.

“No. The light comes from a lamp inside. This is a third order Fresnel lens that reflects and magnifies the light.”

Jessie could have looked at it forever.

This is just the first draft, so maybe I’ll be able to come up with a better description before I finish the book.

But it still won’t come close to describing the indescribable.

__________

¹ So where did Fresnel lenses come from? In the early 1800s, a French committee was formed to study improvements in lighthouse illumination. One of the committee members was Augustin Fresnel, whose design was adopted all over the world. For more information on the history and operation of Fresnel lenses, see the National Park Service article at www.nps.gov/articles/fresnel-lens.htm.