♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -When you look at a lighthouse, it's a building.

It's a civil engineering building.

But the heart and soul is its optic.

What gives it the light?

Without a light, you don't have a lighthouse, and I think a lot of people don't perhaps appreciate the amount of invention and work that has gone in to constantly evolving and making that light as bright as possible for the safety of the mariner at sea.

Well, if you go back to the 1700s, you had a Swiss-designed oil lamp, often using sperm whale oil or vegetable oil with a reflector behind it.

So, you were just merely reflecting the light.

And as ships went from sail to steam in the late 1700s, early 1800s, so they got faster, and of course, the ship owners, who had very expensive cargo from all around the world, because trade was booming, they wanted their cargo safe and they wanted their seamen safe.

And the French had a very good system of educating their civil engineers through the polytechnic school and the school of bridges and roads, and a young man called Fresnel, Augustin-Jean Fresnel, went through that system and became a very, very good physicist, and he was commissioned with a small budget from the Lighthouse Commission to resolve the issue around how to make the light brighter.

Fresnel was the first one to say, "Well, I think I can create a lens system that will magnify the light, and when you have a glass for an optic, it must be without flaws.

No bubbles, no stripes.

Just pure optical glass."

So, he went to an instrument maker called Francois Soleil, who helped him create, essentially, a prototype, and they worked on this prototype in the 1820s, and he was then in a fit state to challenge the leading reflector manufacturer with one of his prototype lenses.

It took him over a year, 'til finally, they created the first lighthouse Fresnel lens, which they installed in what is often called the King's Lighthouse, which is the lighthouse in Cordouan in the Gironde estuary.

They were very expensive, and you could understand why there was some reluctance to adopt them.

Trinity House were, "Hmm, this is very expensive.

We have got perfectly good reflectors with great oil lamps.

Why do we need this expense?"

But eventually, because the French were proving their worth, Trinity House thought it was worth exploring.

So, the Chance Brothers were fantastic glass makers and they made a Fresnel lens for the Great Exhibition in 1851.

And so, you start to see the lighthouses of Scotland, Wales, England, and Ireland adopting the Fresnel lens.

♪♪ You have not only a sudden boom in the actual structures being built, but now you have a fantastic lens, which is slowly evolving.

♪♪ -The Fresnel lens dramatically increases the power of the light by using prisms to redirect and magnify the light in one direction, creating a focused beam of light.

-If you could take a slice down it, it looks like teeth because there are all of these glass prisms, and they're very, very accurately made.

So, they would have been cast into a metal mold and then hand polished with rouge, and it's said that the ladies were so good at polishing these sides that they were absolutely lethally sharp, and they actually had to blunt them so that the guys putting the lens together didn't cut themselves to pieces.

So, you have this beautiful structure.

They are all just works of art.

♪♪ ♪♪ -As the technology of the lens improved, attention turned to improving the source of the light.

-John Richardson Wigham came from Edinburgh to Dublin, and in 1861, he developed these concentric rings of a gaslight with lots of little jets.

So, the biggest had about 180 jets in it.

The remarkable thing is he could produce the light at different levels.

On a moonlit night, you wouldn't need very much light, so you might only light a proportion of this burner.

As it got foggier or darker, you could then light up the whole burner.

He wrote to Irish Lights, and they said, "Okay, let's see what it can do.

Let's experiment with this."

So he installed the first one in the Baily Lighthouse in 1864, but one of the problems was how could you tell one lighthouse from another?

During the day, as you know, they paint them different colors, what they call daymarks, but at night, you needed the flash to give you the characteristic.

What Wigham had done to create the flash was he had a mechanism that could reduce the flame.

So, as it rotated, the flame would go up, you would get a flash, and then the flame would come down.

The Chance Brothers solved it a different way by splitting the lens.

So, Saint John's Point, County Down have -- the bull's eye is split into two.

So, as it passes the light, you get two quick flashes, but the rotation, because of the friction, because of the weight, was really slow, and eventually, it was a Frenchman, another Frenchman, a gentleman called Monsieur Bourdelle, who created the mercury bath.

♪♪ -In this lighthouse, you've generally got a very large Fresnel lens.

Especially the bigger lighthouses, you've got really huge structures.

They can be kind of two-story, and they weigh up to five, 10 tons sometimes, and they rotate in a big bath of mercury.

So, that gives those kind of spokes of light that you see rotating around.

♪♪ -A support ring was bolted to the bottom of the optic, the name for the entire glass structure.

This was then placed in a circular trough filled with mercury.

Because mercury is 13-and-a-half times denser than water, and because it remains liquid at room temperature, the heavy optic floated on the liquid mercury.

-It's an ingenious solution originally.

You can push it with your finger to actually start something that weighs several tons.

♪♪ You might have up to 30 liters of mercury, actually at some of these lighthouses, which is a huge amount of mercury, and it is a toxic substance as well, and it can be damaging to the nervous system.

So, we're looking to take out those big mercury baths and change them over to ball bearings, and we're looking then to sit the historic lenses on top of the ball bearing raise instead of the mercury, and it'll rotate on that.

♪♪ What we're trying to do at the moment is to change over to something that looks identical.

You know, it'll be a flashing, rotating light.

As it comes around, you'll see it.

It's still going to be the same look to it.

It'll just have an LED light source.

What people don't really want to see is something that flashes just kind of off and on, and while that gives the same flash, to a mariner, if you're out kind of, you know, 10, 12 miles at sea, but if you're up any closer to it, you don't get that same rotating light, and in certain cases, we have changed over from those old rotating lights to flashing lights, and that's something that people, you know, they don't like, and we do totally understand that.

You know, people are very attached to the lighthouses and they kind of feel it's, you know, part of their local community.

So, we are very much trying to kind of protect the heritage there.

Like, the big lens will be kept, the mercury baths will still be kept.

We're just draining the mercury out.

So, if in the future, there's kind of a substitute to mercury, we can put it back in again.

♪♪ -If we go back to the Romans and the Egyptians and the monks with their bonfire on the cliff top, and you look where we are now, you can see how technology, engineering, and science has constantly evolved, constantly ask the question, "Can I make this light better?

Can I magnify the light?

Can I use a different fuel?

Can I use a different element in a lamp?

What can I do to make this the best light ever?"

But the constant evolution, the constant working will carry on.

I don't believe that it's stopped.

Now, the light is produced renewably with solar panels 'round the lantern room balcony, leading to battery packs.

Who would have thought in 1850 that that was possible?

Who would have thought in 1750 that you could create a lens that magnified the light?

This is the constant evolution of science and engineering, working to make the best aid to navigation that can be made possible.

♪♪ -Maurice Fitzgerald, the 18th Knight of Kerry, was well connected from his time as a member of Parliament, and from 1828, he lobbied for a lighthouse to be built at Cromwell Point on Valentia Island.

In 1841, the tower was completed, and the light shone for the first time.

The purpose of the light was to guide ships into and out of Valentia Harbor and safely past Harbour Rock.

The station was looked after by a single lighthouse keeper who lived with his family in a substantial house surrounded by a wall intended to keep the sea at bay.

Maurice Fitzgerald's son, Peter, the 19th Knight of Kerry, promoted Valentia Island as the landing place for the transatlantic telegraph cable, the most modern communications technology of the mid-19th century.

-Telegraphy was being expanded in the 1830s and 1840s, and it started really with the expansion of the railways in the big cities.

The reason for it was, of course, for health and safety.

They needed to send messages down the line to stop train crashes and what have you, and that's why the early telegraph lines traveled along the railway tracks.

[ Train rumbling ] But very quickly, they needed to go underwater, and they needed an insulation, and that was found from a tree in Southeast Asia.

It was a substance called gutta-percha, and a man by the name of Henry Buley, a chemist in Dublin, found a way of extracting that and applying it onto the telegraph wires that would insulate it from the water, and that allowed the telegraph lines to be expanded big time.

Scotland and Northern Ireland were connected, England and France were connected about 1851, and by the mid-1850s, London was able to make contact all the way east, as far as Moscow, in the north, as far as Saint Petersburg, and in the south, as far as Istanbul.

But to the west, there was no go.

Contact with the new world at that time was only by ship.

It took at least two weeks, depending on the weather and then, of course, you waited assembly at the time for the message to come back.

You had 2,500 miles of Atlantic Ocean, several miles deep, and it was thought an impossible feat, but Cyrus Field was the man that was responsible for overcoming all that.

Cyrus Field was an industrialist in New York.

He made his money in the paper business, and he had more or less retired in his 30s, but a chance meeting with a man called Frederic Gisborne, and he had an idea that he would lay telephone poles along Newfoundland, he would lay the wire across the Cabot Strait to Nova Scotia and on down by land to New York, and then he would intercept messages off the ships in Newfoundland coming from London, and he would save four days in time.

Now, when Cyrus Field saw that, he saw the bigger picture and he said, "Why send a ship to Newfoundland when maybe you could put the cable all the way across the Atlantic?"

And he set about investigating that.

And the first thing he did was he met the American Navy, a man by the name of Maury.

He asked him about soundings in the Atlantic, and Maury said, "I have just completed a survey of the Atlantic for the American Navy."

And he said, "There is a beautiful plateau," he said, "running from Newfoundland all the way to Ireland.

It's made," he said, for your cable.

It's still two miles deep," but," he said, "it's much shallower than what's to the north and the south of it."

Cyrus Field then set about raising funds with the British government and the American government to lay a cable across the Atlantic.

He secured the services of two ships -- the Niagara from the American government and the Agamemnon from the British government.

The Niagara went west and the Agamemnon went east.

-When the cable was complete, Queen Victoria sent President Buchanan a 99-word congratulatory message, and the president replied in kind.

It took 16 and a half hours to transmit the Queen's message, but it was regarded as a miraculous technological achievement, and there were huge celebrations in New York.

In an effort to speed up the transmission of messages, larger electrical currents were sent down the cable, but this caused the cable to burn out.

The cable had worked for just two weeks.

-So, the cable had burnt out back in 1858.

They needed to get it reconnected.

That was the driving ambition of many of these big companies and investors, and they'd improved the sort of cable core.

They'd improved the insulation.

They'd improved the technology using seamen's technology, actually, and in 1865, they said, "Right, let's go.

Let's take this cable back across, a new cable from Valentia Island to Newfoundland, and let's get that connection back."

And they said, "Well, where are we going to find a ship big enough to put all this cable on?

There's no such ship in the world apart from one."

And that was the Great Eastern.

♪♪ The Great Eastern was much the largest luxury liner in the world at that time.

It was designed by that engineering genius, Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and it was an extraordinary ship.

It was 22,000 tons.

It had six masts.

There was something like 2,000 men working on it, and it took six years to build the hull, one of these just extraordinary Victorian feats.

-The Great Eastern was the biggest ship afloat at the time.

It was 692 feet long, and it had been losing money hand over fist, and it was put up for auction and Cyrus Field bought it for £25,000.

-They got the Great Eastern and they stripped it of all its luxurious furnishings, took everything out, cleared it, and put in these giant spools, and then wrapped the Atlantic cable on, a cable that's going to be long enough to get from Ireland to Newfoundland without stopping, and it took six months to get the cable onto the ship.

So, that gives you an insight into how big it was, and they set off with Robert Halpin as first officer.

Robert Halpin is born into this unsung maritime dynasty.

George Halpin, the inspector of lights who built all the lighthouses around Ireland -- that was his uncle.

His father, James Halpin, ran the Bridge House, which was a tavern in Wicklow town, and when Robert was a kid, he would have been listening to all the seafarers, the fishermen and the mariners, all gathering in that pub and telling all their salty tales of shipwrecks and foreign lands and all that stuff, and he clearly was hooked.

So hooked that he was only 11 years old when he joined a Canadian timber ship that was going from Wicklow to Quebec, and he became a crew member at the age of 11, which was amazing, but those experiences and what he learned during those trips would set him up for life.

He was clearly so competent, that at the age of 22, he became master of one of the transatlantic passenger liners that was running from Galway to New York.

So, after all this sort of running backwards and forwards across the Atlantic, in 1865, he gets a new job as first officer on board the Great Eastern.

♪♪ -In 1865, Cyrus Field was ready to make another attempt to lay a cable across the Atlantic.

-It's a massive event from the word go.

The press are deeply involved.

William Russell, who is from Dublin, but he was the most famous "Times" correspondent of the day -- he's actually on the vessel and he's sending his reports down the telegraph line as it's going out to sea, and he's reporting directly on progress.

Cyrus Field, who's the kind of Elon Musk character who bankrolled the whole thing -- it was his vision -- he's on board the ship, so everybody's keeping a very close watch on progress.

-Within two weeks, they were 600 miles off of Newfoundland and there was a fault in the cable, and while they were trying to sort it, the cable snapped.

-So, they haul in the cable, and that's a big process to haul it in, and they get it up and they fix the crack, and all is fine and they're just feeding it back into the ocean, and suddenly, as one of the crew members said, it took on a life of its own and literally just unraveled the whole thing off the Great Eastern into the sea.

The whole thing hit the sea floor, and they were left on board going, "We've got no cable."

-They tried grappling it, but it had 2,500 fathom lengths and there were joined together with shackles, and a chain is as strong as its weakest link, and as they were hauling up, the shackles began to break, and eventually, they had to abandon.

-But Robert Halpin is on board and he is entrusted with charting the position where this thing -- they didn't even know if it was the cable -- but this thing that they kept catching.

He put the latitudes and longitudes of where it was and recorded that and they sailed back to London.

In 1866, they go it again.

It's the Anglo-American Telegraph Company.

They take the Great Eastern and they put a new cable on all those spools.

Robert Halpin's there as well, and they set off, and they got two purposes.

First of all, they're going to lay this new cable all the way to Newfoundland, and secondly, they're going to see if they can find the other one.

This time, they were successful, and a ship came out from Newfoundland with the cable and they fused the two together and they made the connection, and then they head off and try and find the other cable that they dropped.

It is Halpin in charge.

He's only got a compass and he finds the spot that he had marked, and they send down these other grappling hooks.

They haul it up, and they get the second cable.

They put it back on, they drag it to Heart's Content, Newfoundland, and they connect that one, too.

So, suddenly, you've got two cables running across the Atlantic.

-And they say Cyrus Field wept as he sent a message along the '65 cable into Valentia and back out along the '66 cable and down to New York.

-It was such a massive moment, getting the transatlantic cables, connecting -- you know, permanently connecting America and Europe.

It was a landing-on-the-moon moment for the people of that generation.

♪♪ -The choice of Valentia as the landing place for the first transatlantic cable in 1857 had a huge impact on the island, economically and socially.

But from the 1930s, the cable operations here were threatened with closure, and in 1966, the last telegraphic message was sent from Valentia.

What were once the hub of a global communications network are now historic buildings, hoping to attain UNESCO World Heritage status.

A short distance away, the lighthouse at Cromwell Point continues to guide vessels into and out of the harbor, more than 180 years after it was built.

♪♪ ♪♪ The telegraph cable between Valentia Island and Newfoundland had revolutionized communication, but the submarine cables were soon facing tough competition from the latest technology -- radio waves.

♪♪ Guglielmo Marconi was born in 1874.

His father was Italian and his mother was Irish.

He was determined to prove that electrical waves could cross the Atlantic, something regarded as impossible by the scientific establishment at the time.

-Prior to this, Morse code communication had been by a cable, a physical connection between two stations.

Now, from 1896, you have wireless communication.

People didn't think it was possible initially, that Marconi was some kind of P.T.

Barnum, like, circus man who was all magic.

It was witchcraft, but it wasn't.

He was able to use electromagnetic waves to send a message, to send Morse code.

In the early 1900s, there was a great deal of uncertainty and lack of knowledge as to how radio waves functioned.

-His critics primarily questioned his theories that you could not send a signal around the world because the world is round and signals have to go in straight lines, And for a long time, he faced a lot of criticism, mainly from from British scientists.

"This could not be done."

-Initially, the thought was, "Well, there are a line of sight between point A and point B, and you need to be able to see -- your transmitter and receiver need to be able to see each other."

Or there was a sense that if you broadcast, it'd simply go up into the air and they'd vanish off into space, and what wasn't realized was that there are layers of the ionosphere, and there's a particular layer called the F layer, that will allow a radio wave to bounce up and down, and it was bouncing a radio wave off the ionosphere that allowed Marconi to get his signal to Newfoundland and to be picked up.

So, he was very lucky that he got those particular atmospheric and ionospheric conditions on the day when he sent it, because I believe he found it very hard to initially replicate the experiment, and there were people in the UK, the Astronomer royal, I think being one, who said, "No, this cannot be done", but we now know that it can.

-Money wasn't a major problem, and that probably assisted him in making the breakthroughs he made.

He set up a signal station in Cornwall, then one in Crookhaven, and in 1903, he got permission to set up telegraphic equipment for sending signals on the Fastnet Lighthouse.

-In 1904, an engineer from the Marconi Wireless Telegraph Company arrived on the Fastnet to install the telegraphic equipment, which the keepers were taught how to operate.

The newest lighthouse in Ireland now had access to the most modern form of communication technology.

-And why this is really important for Irish Lights is that it means that they can keep in touch with stations by which it otherwise might be difficult to get in touch with or impossible, but also for Irish Lights, radio is important and what Marconi is doing is important because it allows Irish Lights to send danger signals, warning signals, alert signals not just by the light waves that we're used to that come out of lighthouses, but by radio waves.

So, you see the use of radio to ensure safety at sea, that the radio wave can be manipulated by Irish Lights engineers to ensure communications, safety, and safer sea lanes for all.

♪♪ -His great achievement was when he was able to put radio equipment on board the SS Philadelphia going across the Atlantic because up until then, large ships crossing the Atlantic were out there on their own with no contact.

-Wireless enabled communication to be made with vessels off the Irish Coast at a far greater distance than, say, visual contact via a telescope or a heliograph or something, that Marconi's experiments -- initially, he could get a radio wave to go 16 kilometers.

Then it was 50 kilometers.

Then it was 100 kilometers.

And so, if you were waiting for urgent news, you could use radio to communicate that news more quickly, and that's where the southwest coast of Ireland is so important in the late 19th and early 20th century, in terms of its reach out into the south western approaches, that if you were a passenger on a ship and you wanted to communicate with London, with anywhere in the world, you can send a telegraph message that would be picked up by the Marconi station and then sent further on to London.

What the south coast of Ireland is enabling -- it's almost like one big mobile phone mast, if we can put it in contemporary terms, that the wireless waves being sent out from ships plying off the Irish coast were being picked up and then fed into this Victorian Internet, if you like, which was pretty much what the cable system was.

So, the wireless system allowed this communication from sea to shore and enabled the world to become a smaller and indeed faster place, I think.

-Don't forget, that was a time when news did not travel fast.

News took days to communicate.

Events took quite some time to move from one continent to another or from one part of a country to another.

So, it transformed news.

People on a cruise line going across the Atlantic or on a freight ship going across the Atlantic knew what was happening in the world.

It was the equivalent of the mobile phone.

You had it everywhere you were going.

-Marconi never lived in Ireland, but he was in Ireland to supervise the construction of the various stations, and of course, he was Irish by background.

His mother was Irish.

He had support by Irish businessmen.

So, I think there are experiments going on in other parts of the world and putting cables and wireless in other locations, but Ireland is really important from this point of view, and it's something that we tend to forget.

If you look at Ireland's geographical position, we're on a great circle route between London and New York, two great cities in the Western world.

It mightn't be a great power militarily or economically, but geographically, Ireland has something that no other country in the world can have -- its location.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -Lighthouses seem to get more recognition than lightships.

Like, you know, people can relate to lighthouses, but they can't relate to lightships.

It was a lot harder to be on a lightship than a lighthouse, you know?

-The first lightship in Ireland was stationed in Dublin Bay in 1735, and for almost 250 years, lightship keepers lived and worked in conditions that were much tougher than those endured by the keepers on even the most isolated rock-based lighthouses.

♪♪ -Lightships go back 300 years.

Very, very important part of our history.

So, the lightship behind us is the Kittiwake, which was operated by Irish Lights until 2007, when it was sold off.

The ship itself had crew compartments above deck, and then downstairs, it had generators for the lights.

The service life of these ships was between 50 and 75 years.

So, they're very big and bulky.

It's solid steel and designed to take a lot of abuse from the sea.

Ships like this were built like a tank.

-The lightship has gone into history.

It's a tourist attraction moored in dock or on land, but the notion of what you're undertaking as a career, as duty, if you volunteer to serve on a lightship, is something that I think is unknown in the 21st century, and the bravery, the integrity, and the very strength of mind of these men is something that is probably quite unfathomable today.

♪♪ You are totally at the mercy of the forces of nature.

Your lightship is immovable.

It doesn't have a means of propulsion, and there was nothing you could do if something was in your way to prevent it from hitting you, and sometimes in peacetime, this would be -- great vessels of the sea would cut a lightship in half by accident, but during wartime, it was mines and there was very little that lightship keepers could do if a mine came in their direction, and you can imagine the terror that the crew must have been enveloped in, seeing this black spiky object coming closer and closer to them.

[ Explosion ] Normally, a way of dealing with the mine at sea was to try and use a rifle shot to explode one of the horns on the mine and detonate it away from the location that it was coming towards, but in this case, they're not armed.

There's nothing they can do.

They can just wait and hope and pray.

Now, sometimes, they were able to put a boom out, you know, a longish object and gently poke the mine away and hope that it went in a different direction, but that's the exception rather than the rule.

And so, you're completely at the mercy of the world around you, which makes lightship crews absolutely heroic in what they do.

-I was away on a coaster and I got a letter from my dad and he said, "Would you not think of coming home and joining the lightship?"

He said, "You'd have more time at home with your family."

So, I went to Dublin, got the interview, and they told me, "Yeah, you can have the job," and that's how I started.

-I went away to sea when I was 17.

I went into the Royal Navy, like, you know, and I done my nine years in the Royal Navy, and when I came out, I spent a little time ashore, like, you know?

I had a shore job, which I didn't like, like, you know, but I got married as well, like, you know, on the job, and the Coningbeg came up and I took it like, you know?

I was delighted to get back to sea.

-And at that time, years had gone by.

Work wasn't very great to come by, so you had to take what was going.

A lightship man was always considered a good job.

-I remember them all coming ashore.

When they'd come in, they'd have to have the uniforms on, and of course, years ago, anybody in the uniform was kind of looked up to, but back even in the 1800s, it was a great job because it was pensionable and there weren't many pensionable jobs going then.

-There was a lot of Wexford people there.

They had a lot of connections with the lighthouses and lightships, and so it seemed the natural thing for me to do, like, you know, was to go on to the lightships.

There was a Higginbotham on the Hook lighthouse in the 1700s.

Like, you know, that goes back a bit.

-There were so many lightship men and lighthouse keepers, particularly lightship men in Irish Lights manning all the lightships that they were known as the Wexford Navy.

-And Phil Collen from Wexford town has spent 10 years on the lightships, six of them on the Coningbeg.

Phil, what is life like on a lightship?

-Life is very good on a lightship.

We have our hobbies and all that, make mats, ships in bottles, play cards, a bit fishing.

-Miles Doyle of Wexford.

Miles, how do you spend your time on board the lightship?

-Well, there's various, things I do, but ships in bottles and we play cards a lot, like, and of course, that's when we're off duty.

-What do you do with all these ships in bottles?

-Well, there's -- We have plenty of friends we give them to, you know?

Presents here and there, like, you know?

-You can go into a lonely part in your head, like, you know, and if you haven't got a hobby, like, you know, it's even worse, like, you know, so... -After being at sea and moving around from port to port and place to place and then you suddenly realize where you are and -- "God almighty, what am I doing here, stuck in this spot?"

You know?

It hits you hard, like for the first few weeks anyway but you'd have to get used to it, you know?

I suppose most of the time, like, there's only two of you on watch, like, you know, so the rest of them are trying to get some sleep at that time or whatever to do, like, you know, but you know, you can have your little arguments out there as well.

Like, you know, it's like any ship, like, you know?

People fall out as well, like, you know, so... -So, we're doing it a month on and a month off, but you had to buy your own food, you see, and when you joined the ship, you were given two baskets, two wicker baskets, and when you're going out to join the ship, you'd bring out one basket.

with two weeks' food with you.

When the fortnight was up, then the other basket'd come out with the second fortnight's provisions in it, and the bread you'd have to put down into the chain locker, which is the deepest part of the ship, hopefully to keep it fresh, but by the time you'd be ready to eat it at the end of the two weeks, you were cutting two inches of blue mold off of it, and believe me, it wasn't nice.

[ Chuckles ] -Are you married?

-I am not.

No.

-Find you here, saying that it won't be long until you are married.

-That's right.

Yes.

-What does the future wife think about you spending most of your time on a lightship?

-Well, she'd rather have me on shore, but as she said, she said I love the sea too much to give it up.

So, I have to stay where I am.

-Your whole idea was to get home and get back to the family, and your heart would be up in your mouth 'til that tender was alongside and you got into her.

-Captain Jim Voshell, you have just been relieved.

How does it feel?

-Oh, it feels very good indeed.

It feels very good.

And we're always happy to get ashore, you know, after our sojourn on board, our duty on board, and we look forward to it, especially -- this is the Christmas liberty, and we enjoy it very much.

-Most of the time, though, you'd get your relief on time, but it could turn nasty, too, and maybe you could be two or three days maybe waiting on a relief.

-On one occasion, I was going to the Fastnet and the weather was bad, and the Daunt Lightship relief was brought together because of the weather, and there was five men, I think, going out and five men coming in relief on the lightship.

I'd never seen anything like this before.

I was a young lad.

I wasn't down at the surface, but the lantern of the lightship was really swaying over and back and the sea was coming level with the deck and down again, like that, and I saw the men that were coming ashore and they jumped off the deck of that to a boat that was coming up against them and a wave of white water between them and the ship.

and they wouldn't be allowed to do it today.

Safety wouldn't -- No way they could do it.

But I remember that and I thought, "God, they're brave men."

-You're at the mercy of the sea, for starters, like, you know, and then most lighthouses, like, are on land and they can go off and go up to the pub and have a pint, like, you know, if they want or maybe we can just look in at the land and look at other people going up to the pub.

-And the life they had on lightships, bad as it was with us, we were on solid -- but if you can imagine, you're aboard a ship -- normally, a ship will go with the sea one way or the other or both ways, but when you're in a lightship, there's an anchor chain and you're stationary, and so, you're going this way and this way and that way as one, and every now and then, the anchor chain will pull tight and you'd get this surge and you get... right up along the deck wherever you happen to be.

Your lunch could go flying off the table.

-Well, you'd get a jerk on it, like, you know?

As soon as the sea rises, like, you know, you're pulled on it and it drops down as well, and then you're back up again, like, you know?

So, there's not much sleep to be got in bad weather on lightships like, you know?

It came to an end when Irish Lights introduced the LANBY buoy, which was an automatic buoy, like, you know?

They just took the lightship off and put the the LANBY buoys in instead of them, like, you know?

So that was the end of that.

♪♪ -It is the policy of the commissioners to withdraw these over a phased period.

We are replacing it with a high focal plane buoy, by which we find that with modern navigational techniques on board vessels and facilities on board ships, which should be adequate, together with other radio beacons, which we are establishing at the Old Head of Kinsale and at Ballycotton Lighthouse.

♪♪ -The loss of the Puffin Lightship on the Daunt Rock in October 1896, I think is one of those Victorian tales that you could develop out into a film.

I mean, it encompasses all of the tragedy and progress of Victoriana and the Victorian era.

♪♪ The Puffin Lightship is a modern double hulled lightship.

It's at the apex of lightship technology, moored off the Cork Coast on the Daunt Rock.

It's only just in station and it's a triumph of Victorian engineering.

♪♪ ♪♪ -1896, there was a very violent storm.

-It was the worst storm in living memory to hit the Cork Coast, and Puffin Lightship, of course, was out on station and there was a Coast Guard man came down just to make sure his boat was clear of the waves coming in, and he saw the light of the lightship at 4:30 in the morning, but by the time he had gone home, he said there was no light there.

-It's lost.

It vanishes.

It's gone.

Initially, stories fly around the Cork area that Puffin is safe.

Puffin has been seen down the coast, floating off Tramore, moored off Tramore.

It's okay.

-But as the days passed, two lightship men's caps and two oars from their own lifeboat with the name of the Puffin burned into the oars washed up on the beach.

-Puffin has been overwhelmed by the power of the sea and the men are lost.

-The loss of the Puffin was one of the worst tragedies that Irish Lights had.

That's why they needed to get the wreck back.

They really needed to find out what happened because the same thing they were afraid might happen to the other lightships around.

-The events that lead to the discovery of the wreck of the Puffin I think again show so much about the Victorian world.

They're using technology to find her, divers in what we now consider very primitive technology down into very dangerous waters, risking life and limb while searching for the wreck of Puffin.

-The classic old movies will show you the kind of diving suits that these guys had, with a big metal helmet on it and a glass circular thing, and they'd have the big pipe and a motor pushing air into it, and these guys were sent down 90 foot.

It's very hard to see any significant distance, particularly if there had been a storm not too long beforehand because it'll be keeping the water muddy.

The thing that amazes me is down there, that they actually found it.

♪♪ ♪♪ -Puffin found and is refloated, and there's an inquiry in Dublin into why Puffin sank, and there's all sorts of rumors and stories and -- Was she hit by a liner?

Was it a sea monster that did it?

But it comes down to structural defects in the end.

-The most likely thing that happened -- it was a hollow mast with a ladder up inside it where they hoisted up the lantern up the mast.

It was 27 feet up, and that lantern was two and a half tons' weight.

So, you can imagine the pressure that that had.

-The mast was ripped off by the storm, and in ripping off, it removed some of the superstructure, and that allowed the water to go in, and the eight men on board didn't stand a chance.

It's a really poignant example of how the sea and technology and human nature all interact within the context of Irish lights, and it also brings up, particularly in this context of a lighthouse service, just how dangerous it was to be a lightship man.

It is a very, very difficult form of life.

♪♪ -In 1982, the few remaining lightship keepers came ashore for the last time, when the lightship automation process was complete.

The Gannet was the last lightship operating in Irish waters, located at the South Rock off the county down coast.

In 2009, the Gannet was decommissioned and towed away to Dun Laoghaire by the Irish lightship the Brawny Whale.

Nearly 300 years after the first lightship had been anchored in Dublin Bay, it was the end of a distinguished chapter in the history of Irish Lights.

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