11:27 Casually glossed over the story of a lighthouse keeper who was trapped with a dead body for a month, mentioned in the timeline. I tried to look into this, and found the lighthouse keeper in question was John Potter, and the dead man was Isaac Dorkin. Dorkin got sick with a terrible fever, which got worse fast. He became delirious and at one point had to be tied to his bed because he kept fighting Potter trying to do God knows what with the lights when Potter was lighting them. Potter signaled for help, but bad weather kept the usual boats away. That bad weather became a "perfect hurricane," and bad weather persisted for a month, during most of which Dorkin was dead. Potter wouldn't toss the body into the sea because he didn't want to be accused of murder, and the whole place stunk from the rotting corpse. When a boat finally showed up, they dumped the body into the sea because it was too rotten to take to land, and John Potter retired from lighthouse keeping forever. I couldn't nail down an exact date for this, but just as the timeline showed it appeared to be a little after 1720. There was a pretty interesting account of this (among other things) in chapter 5 of a book called "The Story of the Rock," by R. M. Ballantyne (published in 1875 according to Wikipedia), which is available here: www.gutenberg.org/files/23272/23272-h/23272-h.htm (That book says the pair became keepers a bit after the first one who occupied it in 1720.) There is another account of the history of the lighthouse which briefly mentions this here: www.rmg.co.uk/stories/blog/library-archive/narrative-building-edystone-sic-lighthouse-stone-pbb4061
If I recall correctly, he also tied the coffin to the outside to avoid the smell and during the hurricane strong winds blasted the coffin and Potter saw a human hand slam into the window. Im pretty sure this is also the exact incident that partially inspired Robert Egger'sThe Lighthouse, from 2019
Are you sure? I though that was a lighthouse of the coast of Wales with Thomas howl and Thomas Griffiths? That incident was why lighthouses went from two to three-man crews, just in case.
Fair play to the French king for letting him go, kind of like how modern militaries have agreements not to attack hospital ships. No doubt a significant number of French trade ships had met their demise on those rocks as well as English ships, so a lighthouse benefits everyone.
Indeed. Or, a more nefarious interpretation is that the lighthouse also made a nice marker for French naval vessels to locate one of England's major shipping ports.
@@PongoXBongo way more probablethat they were worried about their own ships and also wanted to find the port than OPs opinion, if I ever learned anything about wars is that even today killing civilians is so common that the only reason they wouldn't is if they are low on ammunition.
I wish my dad knew English well enough for him to understand this video. He absolutely loves lighthouses, a former sailor himself. Oh well, I'll have to translate for him. Thanks for this. Very informative, very well put together.
I don't know about on phones/tablets, but on youtube on a computer at least, you can click subtitles on, and then change the subtitle language - which uses Google Translate so there's a lot of languages in there! For the same reason (computer translation not human translation) it makes a few mistakes, but it should be able to understand most of it.
Hey dude I'm doing research on lighthouses these days and I was wondering if there were some lighthouse ghost stories passed on between lighthouse keepers. Do you or your dad know anything about that ?
@@alkaholic4848 I wish the google translate option was always there. For some reason even when there are auto generated subtitles that option does not always appear. But it is a real godsend when it does, in those cases where translated subtitles are not uploaded.
A lot of younger people like to hate the city but, to be honest, Plymouth and the surrounding area are really underrated. It's a great city, both historically and today.
"Everyone said I was daft to build a lighthouse in the Channel! But I built it all the same! It sank into the Channel, SO... I built a second one! And THAT sank into the Channel. So I built a THIRD one! That burned down, fell over, then sank into the Channel. But the fourth one STAYED UP! And that's what you're gonna get, Son! The strongest lighthouse in these Isles!"
You wouldn't just happen to be a Monty Python devotee per chance Sebastian..??..nearly as dead awful as building a bloody great castle on a ruddy great swamp hey mate.'Wot!..the curtains?'..😃😂😁hehehehe😃😄😅😉😈(/-\)
You have a good sense of humor, interesting topics to cover, and no matter what you talk about it never gets boring! To me you're on par with SmarterEveryDay, Vsauce, Veritasium, and other cool science/interesting thing channels.
I know it from the old song: "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light. He slept with a mermaid one fine night. Out of that union there came three: A porpoise, a porgy, and the other was me."
My mom has sang this to me since I was a kid, and now sings it to my kids, though there are other lyrics, "He married a mermaid one fine night," rather than slept. :)
Without any hyperbole, this is one my favorite videos on the internet. I come back to it all the time, despite basically being able to quote it word for word. :)
People are really harsh on Winstanley and its not fair! I actually really like the lighthouse, its beautifully ghibbliesque. Its so easy to look back arrogantly and point out all the flaws with hindsight but people forget NO ONE had ever tried to build a tower in the open ocean...ever... and he tried, rather than carping about the issue like everybody before him, he actually dug his hand into his pocket and tried, and tried again when it started to fail, and died trying (he was performing repairs when he died). The design looks fantastically weird but its worth remembering two things: 1) it was the baroque period and 2) He was a showman, not just an inventor and ship owner but an actual showman; he created and owned the Essex house of wonders and Winstanley's Water-works ( a theme park with fireworks, fountains, automatons etc in Piccadilly) all of the mechanisms of which he built himself, he was eccentric but I love him :)
Yes, Winstanley's lighthouse was a remarkable achievement bearing in mind the sheer difficulty of even accessing the reef let alone building on it and the fact that nothing like it had ever been attempted before. Also, if the 1703 storm had not been of such exceptional severity, the structure would have no doubt lasted longer than five years.
L L, So, true. We'll never understand what it was like to wake and live an average day in the Baroke era !!! (from socks on my feet to table wares to eat with, not to mention, "where is the bathroom, I'd like to brush my teeth". WTH !!!!! LOL ehh.
Everyone said you cant build a castle in the swamp, but i did, and it sank, so I built another one it caught fire then sank, ........thank you monty python
“My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light, he married a mermaid one fine night” I have been singing since the sixties. Thanks for the history lesson. I enjoyed all the humor, too!
"Captain! Some rocks ahead! We must turn at once!" "By Neptune's Beard, I shan't allow it!" "But...rocks!!!" "Honor, man! Honor! Britannia rules the waves, not the other way 'round. Are we British or are we not?!" * CRASH *
came for a story of the 1st known eaten molten lead, stayed for the wholesomeness of this guy's story telling. I've never thought I'd be this invested in a lighthouse
Thanks for that most interesting insight. I was in the Australian Navy many years ago, and in 1977 my ship became one of the first Australian warships to visit the UK since WWII, for QEII's Silver Jubilee. We went to Portsmouth first, and then Plymouth, so we steamed past the Eddystone Light a few times. That was before GPS, of course, and I remember taking compass bearings off Light for our Nav fixes. I always wondered how that managed to build a light tower out there, and I saw the remnants of Smeaton's Tower on the Hoe in Plymouth.
Thanks for this! I only knew the folk song ‘My father was the keeper of the Eddystone Light’ until I went to Plymouth for a conference in ‘99 and had the pleasure of climbing Smeaton’s tower! What a delightful history!
It feels like you were about to say more at 21:48 about the cofferdam. Absolutely fantastic video though, I've learned quite a lot. A little bit of trivia, the Dovetailed Granite blocks used in Douglass's design were quarried from De Lank Quarry near Bodmin, Cornwall. Then taken to my hometown of Wadebridge to be dovetailed by the stonemasons there. They named the road where the masons worked Eddystone Road.
This channel is underrated it's a real shame that it doesn't get more views. I think with the right title, this and many other videos would be a real success on Reddit.
RU-vid favours constant uploading, not well made lengthy videos. You could post it to Reddit but Reddit is a tough place and it takes some luck to pick up popularity.
I never thought I'd end up watching a 25 minute video on lighthouses today but here we are. I'm now subscribing and going to watch all your other videos too.
Dang, that's insanely impressive! I imagine Smeaton just laughing his ass off from beyond the grave as engineers desperately struggle to take apart what he'd created. That's especially outstanding considdering the lighthouse was well over 100+ years old, too. Thanks for the video Zeph, your content is the *best!*
I watched this video after having watched several other historical videos and being HIGHLY annoyed at the horrible narrators. Then I saw this one and was not only fascinated with the story, but constantly entertained by the narrator's professional sounding voice and brilliant sense of humor (that chess joke ... perfect! :D ). So, my faith in RU-vidrs fully restored, time for me to get off my derriere and get some actual work done. Excellent video! Thanks!
A fascinating story of the Lighthouse. I was interested in it because I have done the difficult dive on the site several times. The water is clear, the sea bed is littered with stone blocks, old wood pieces, the largest I found was 2.5-3 metres and is covered in sea growth. The dive is 30 metres maximum depth on the northern side, however, once you swim through the gap between the lighthouses, the sea bed drops away and the current is like walking into a motorway. It's hard to hold onto the old lighthouse site as the tide is that strong. I'm astounded you can see the "new" lighthouse from the park at Plymouth Hoe, especially as it takes a few hours to sail to it and back to Plymouth.
Hydraulic lime is what you get when the lime you use for mortar (before portland cement was a thing, and now still used for restorations) has certain impurities like clay or pozzolan. It has always been around in lime from certain quaries, but Smeatons innovation was selecting the lime precisely for this attribute. The main advantage is curing time, while normal, air hardening lime mortar might take weeks to set, and years until it archieves something close to it's final compressive strenght, hydraulic lime sets in days, although it still needs a couple of months to get to it's final strenght as well, as it still has a air hardening component to it. It's basically a mortar between the very fast setting modern portland cement based mortars, and traditional (mostly) air hardening lime mortars. As for concrete, not in this application, if used with aggregate you could make a lime based concrete, like the romans did, but here it's just mortar.
Another idea... every ship that passes by the reef should dump a few tons of fill material around the reef or at a specified nearby loading site, which can then be added to the the reef until after many years and thousands of passing ships add enough material to where the 1 square mile area is no longer a reef but an island complete with its own lighthouse, supplies, rescue center , etc. No more reef, just a new island that can serve as a stop-off before arriving at Plymouth and also serve as a rescue operations center and limited resupply station.
Incredibly interesting video. I grew up as a kid singing "My father was the keeper of the Eddystone light...", but it never dawned on me that it was a real lighthouse. And with one hell of an fascinating story, no less.
Great video. Having spent years of my life going up and down smeatons tower and sailing past the eddy stone it’s so lovely seeing a video on it. Keep up the good work
As a plymouthian, i feel like our towns history is quite overlooked dispite having a quite important naval history to the United Kingdom. I used to be involved with a charity named Eddystone so its nice to know the history behind the lighthouses.
I somehow got here from watching stories of Haunted England but never the less enjoyed it immensely. Very well done, quite in depth and informative. Not incredibly into lighthouses, although having 5 of them about the house and property to get that New England ambiance, you'd think otherwise. At first when I heard Plymouth, I was thinking Plymouth Massachusetts. Loved the commentary, one of the reasons I watched it till the end! Something about a documentary with an English accent makes me feel like I'm actually learning something substantial lol :-D . Instantly adds 20 IQ points ;-) Thank you for the great video!
Wow. That was fascinating. Big thanks to you for this brilliant presentation, and all the effort you put into this (both vid and narration), and the YT-algorithm for this much appreciated random suggestion. I wasn´t much into lighthouses before, but...that might just have changed. Edit: Oh, and the chess joke was brilliant! Edit II: Yes, you DID get a new subscriber
Great documentary, well done! I'm en ex fisherman out of Looe and used to spend many happy days out by the stone, and when I croak it, my ashes are being scattered by that very lighthouse.
blackzed lol I was actually thinking of this quote watching this video and when I came across the comment I was stunned because it’s so obscure: it’s actually from the movie Valkyrie (about the plot to blow Hitler up and actually pretty decent) and I had no idea anyone else had used it. I think it was “almost any problem in the world” but other than that it’s nearly exactly the same, if memory serves. I’m guessing that’s where Semtex got it, lol.
I loved that ending, I laughed out loud. It reminded me of an old joke from Scotland. What did they do when the Forth bridge blew down? They built the Fifth! (It's about the rail bridge over the FORTH of FIFTH, near Edinburgh.
Well this "Nautical beacon-related content" is being recommended to me two years after its original upload, so consider yourself pleasantly surprised! Check mate, sir! (Your chess joke was immaculate)
"You can lead a lighthouse keeper on Eddystone, but you can't make him drink it" (that is unless he'd already accidentally ingested some of the moulton variety from a burning roof) - talk about 'coining a new phrase' (coined out of lead perhaps?)
If the story's true, my gosh that's 10 ounces of molten lead (to us 'Mercans.) #1 how did he survive it? #2 How did he manage to live even the short period afterwards?
A Professional Fisherman ( loads of lobster pots in his garden ) told me that during good conditions, when anchored midway between St Catherine’s Point & Cap le Hague or Barfleur in the English Channel , you can see the lighthouses at either side of the channel - some 60 landmiles apart . Being how he wouldn’t have been very high above sea level I guess he meant seeing both their light beams during darkness . Thanks for this 👍
A fascinating video and, as I'm in the middle of a long term photography project to capture the lighthouses of the British isles, really useful to me. Thanks for putting this together. I also enjoyed the chess joke.
Adam Clark Hiya! Lighthouse aficionado here..How’s the project going? Would. Be intrigued as to the results. Probably finished by now? Since your post is over a year ago. Are you in the UK? Long time Bucket List item is to travel and see all the dang lighthouses surrounding The British Isles. Well that AND the largest Maritime Museum in the world there in Portsmouth. Nautical has been my thing for quite some time now. Great presentation of lighthouse history here. Wish he would do more heh?! Cheers! 👍😁
Hey, VSAUCE! Lighthouse here Interesting vid though mate, nice to see content about the south of England (not often I get to use that line). I mean, if you find anything interesting about Dorset, hit me up :^)
Hey, I know it's a while later but I found something interesting that happened in Dorset (Weymouth/Portland Harbour). en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreadnought_hoax
I watched this when it was first uploaded, but RU-vid really really wants me to watch it again; it's been constantly in my recommended for days now. So here I am.
18:05 - I heard "but did save money with what Brexit prevented." I started wondering why things got briefly political, so I relistened to the line and adjusted my ears.
Loved your joke of the Queen sheltering in the basement during the great storm of 1708. The chessboard. I haven't laughed out loud in days, I tell you, days.
Seems to be very similar to the Bell rock lighthouse being interlinked blocks and shape and sturdyness. That mortar ended up like granite after all those years and if not for the rock foundation, this could have stood forever!
Imagine a couple of rocks being so terrifying that the king of France, let go of his hostage just so that he could finish a light house on them, bro even called them a danger to humanity
I am from Plymouth (currently residing in Florida USA) and as young boys we met and chatted up "Summer Girls" on holiday in Plymouth. There was no internet or porn (1950s), so our entertainment was getting the sweet young ladies to climb the curving metal stair cases, of Smeaton's Tower with us below looking up at their legs and (usually) white nickers! Sorry, but boys will be boys and at 89 I have fond memories of those sweet beautiful young ladies. May they all have had a wonderful life. Smeaton's Tower is still standing and I will climb the staircase again in July this year - 2023. I enjoyed the video and the narrative. Thank you.
This is absolutely worth watching! I was married to a beloved engineer, many engineer friends including Ian Burden of Vancouver, and acquainted with a Miss Winstanley from New Zealand who is support staff for the Shell OIL Pension Plan...so I had a personal interest in this tale. It's a great story, very British in some of the steps taken to create a substantial lighthouse to protect approaching ships. Etc.Etc. Anyway, good job, guys who wrote, directed, and starred in it, and the historical research staff. Kudos!!!
I’ve watched many videos today taking me all around the world, then this recommended video takes me to my doorstep. The world is a small place after all.
I realize this is an older video by internet standards, but it is thoroughly entertaining AND informative all at the same time. The history was entertaining as interesting, the editing kept things from being boring, like many history videos can become and the bits of humour made it enjoyable and fun. Great job!
Honestly.. Wow... Absolutely amazing video. Informative, fascinating and funny. This is some top quality content. Best of luck with next video! Keep it up!!!
Hey Zepherus, I wanted to say that you are one of my top favorite RU-vidrs. When I get a notification saying you've uploaded a video, I get excited. I love history, and I've learned new things from you. You even gave me an interesting perspective on life in your You Are Here Part 2 video. I honestly do wish you the best and hope you keep on explaining fun, interesting facts on interesting topics of history.
Hope you're doing good Zeph! I watch this video like once a year. This video made me realize how many lighthouses have amazing stories. And I've loved getting into my local Lights, these past few years. Almost every lighthouse has a story of the shipwrecks that created the need for the light, the story of how it was designed, how it was built, and the story of the keepers. Now adays theres the stories of the people who maintain and restore lighthouses!
No, it was an engineering failure. He should had taken that in account. Not sure if he could have known that at that time. But that's simply a foundation failure.
