Weekend Wanderings ... Twin Lights

The first lighthouse at the site of the current Twin Lights was built in 1828.

The current massive building was erected in 1862.

The two lights made it easy to identify from quite a distance.

High over Sandy Hook Bay and the channel into New York Harbor, the lights guided the many ships coming into port. That's Highlands, NJ, in the foreground, then Sandy Hook, and New York City in the distance in this view from the North Tower.

The same characteristics that make Rocky Point a prime location for the big guns made this location suitable for a lighthouse. To give an idea of just how close Rocky Point and Twin Lights are to each other, the above image shows the lower (closer) and upper (farther) fields used for gym class by the students of Henry Hudson Regional High School (yours truly included). The guns and the lights are separated by the high school, which came well after each.

Above we are looking at the electric generating house, built to power the lights in 1898. Today it houses the giant Fresnel Lens and several other exhibits.

This lens made the South Tower one of the brightest navigational lights ever used in the United States. Directly visible 22 miles at sea, and when conditions were right, in the sky 70 miles out.

The design of the lens takes advantage of the wave nature of light to increase brightness.

Augustin-Jean Fresnel was a French physicist who championed the wave theory of light, in opposition to Newton's corpuscular theory. Nowadays we have the quantum theory of light, which says that light is both a particle (corpuscle) and a wave. At the time, Fresnel was able to explain phenomena that Newton could not, leading to an adoption of the wave theory of light. It wasn't until the twentieth century that both were found to be 'right'.

The "Bend it like Fresnel" poster is in a small museum that now occupies what was once the living quarters and offices of the light house keeper.  Two other items that caught my attention were the binoculars above and the ferry ticket below.

The ferry ride today is 4000% higher.

The lights were decommissioned in 1949, as new technologies made navigation easier. Today, the North Tower has an aircraft light and the South Tower had what looked like Christmas lights in the shape of a tree (but they did not appear to be on while I was visiting).

Twin Lights is 4.1 miles from the house I grew up in. And immediately adjacent to my high school. This was my first visit.