Question #98082. Asked by tragic_flawed.
Last updated Aug 11 2017.
The first lighthouse built on a rock in the open sea became operational on 14 November, 1698, when its architect, Henry Winstanley, climbed up into its lantern and lit 50 tallow candles. There was pandemonium in Plymouth, "seven leagues away", where the locals had said that building a lighthouse on the Eddystone rock would be impossible; a fisherman brought the news to Plymouth that he and fellow mariners were now safe from the dreaded shoals that had cost so many lives. Hundreds climbed the cliffs and used telescopes to see the feeble light.
Lighthouses and structures are, since the Eddystone rock lighthouse, English Channel, 1698, ever more daringly set on rocks at sea. This was not the case in antiquity. In fact the positioning of a few ancient lighthouses puzzles historians so much some doubt they are lighthouses at all.
Typical emplacements include a rock or a promontory, to signal danger or on a harbour natural or artificial entry, indicating a port. Lighthouses are today in general studied as part of port structures. While Eddystone indicates a notoriously, historically famous wrecks' rock, in antiquity a now lost pillar at Cape Sigeum, ancient Licya, Turkey indicated the Dardanelles mouth, in front of Troy.
Some think it was a Lighthouse, others revered it as an hero's tomb. Were it found, it would be the oldest of them all. Some authors think the two uses, tomb and lighthouse could well coincide. They do for the two oldest known extant lighthouses, not in use, the one at Pyrgos (meaning a light) on Thassos island, an inscription on it indicates it was built to use as a lighthouse, one coeval to the Alexandria famed Pharos, 42 kms from it, indicating Taposiris Magna, Cleopatra's favourite residence.
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