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Middle Bay Lighthouse
Middle Bay Light, also known as Middle Bay Lighthouse and Mobile Bay Lighthouse, is an active hexagonal-shaped cottage style screw-pile lighthouse. The structure is located offshore from Mobile, Alabama, in the center of Mobile Bay. History The station was activated in 1885. In 1916 the keeper's wife gave birth to a baby that summer at the station. According to the Alabama Lighthouse Association web site, the keeper brought a dairy cow to the station and corralled it on a section of the lower deck because his wife was unable to nurse the newborn baby. All had to be evacuated when the station survived but was damaged by a hurricane that year. The light was automated in 1935. The lighthouse was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on December 30, 1974. In 1984 the lighthouse was stabilized by Middle Bay Light Centennial Commission in preparation for the centennial celebration. In 1996 the Coast Guard loaned the original Fresnel lens A Fresnel lens ( ; ; or ) ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mobile Bay, Alabama
Mobile Bay ( ) is a shallow inlet of the Gulf of Mexico, lying within the state of Alabama in the United States. Its mouth is formed by the Fort Morgan Peninsula on the eastern side and Dauphin Island, a barrier island on the western side. The Mobile River and Tensaw River empty into the northern end of the bay, making it an estuary. Several smaller rivers also empty into the bay: Dog River, Deer River, and Fowl River on the western side of the bay, and Fish River on the eastern side. Mobile Bay is the fourth-largest estuary in the United States with a discharge of of water per second. Annually, and often several times during the summer months, the fish and crustaceans will swarm the shallow coastline and shore of the bay. This event, appropriately named a jubilee, draws a large crowd because of the abundance of fresh, easily caught seafood. Mobile Bay is in area. It is long by a maximum width of . The deepest areas of the bay are located within the shipping channel, someti ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fresnel
Augustin-Jean Fresnel (10 May 1788 – 14 July 1827) was a French civil engineer and physicist whose research in optics led to the almost unanimous acceptance of the wave theory of light, excluding any remnant of Newton's corpuscular theory, from the late 1830s until the end of the 19th century. He is perhaps better known for inventing the catadioptric (reflective/refractive) Fresnel lens and for pioneering the use of "stepped" lenses to extend the visibility of lighthouses, saving countless lives at sea. The simpler dioptric (purely refractive) stepped lens, first proposed by Count Buffon and independently reinvented by Fresnel, is used in screen magnifiers and in condenser lenses for overhead projectors. By expressing Huygens's principle of secondary waves and Young's principle of interference in quantitative terms, and supposing that simple colors consist of sinusoidal waves, Fresnel gave the first satisfactory explanation of diffraction by straight edges, includin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Screw-pile Lighthouse
A screw-pile lighthouse is a lighthouse which stands on piles that are screwed into sandy or muddy sea or river bottoms. The first screw-pile lighthouse to begin construction was built by the blind Irish engineer Alexander Mitchell. Construction began in 1838 at the mouth of the Thames and was known as the Maplin Sands lighthouse, and first lit in 1841. However, though its construction began later, the Wyre Light in Fleetwood, Lancashire, was the first to be lit (in 1840). In the United States, several screw-pile lighthouses were constructed in the Chesapeake Bay due to its estuarial soft bottom. North Carolina's sounds and river entrances also once had many screw-pile lights. The characteristic design is a -storey hexagonal wooden building with dormers and a cupola light room. History Non-screwpile (straightpile) tubular skeletal tower lighthouses were built, usually of cast-iron but also of wrought-iron piles, both onshore and offshore, typically on soft bottoms such ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mobile, Alabama
Mobile ( , ) is a city and the county seat of Mobile County, Alabama, United States. The population was 187,041 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. After a successful vote to annex areas west of the city limits in July 2023, Mobile's population increased to 204,689 residents, making it the List of municipalities in Alabama, second-most populous city in Alabama. Mobile is the principal municipality of the Mobile metropolitan area. Alabama's only saltwater port, Mobile is located on the Mobile River at the head of Mobile Bay on the north-central Gulf Coast of the United States, Gulf Coast. The Port of Mobile has always played a key role in the economic health of the city, beginning with the settlement as an important trading center between the French colonization of the Americas, French colonists and Native Americans in the United States, Native Americans, down to its current role as the 12th-largest port in the United States.Drechsel, Emanuel. ''Mobilian Jargon: Lin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Register Of Historic Places
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Historic districts in the United States, districts, and objects deemed worthy of Historic preservation, preservation for their historical significance or "great artistic value". The enactment of the National Historic Preservation Act (NHPA) in 1966 established the National Register and the process for adding properties to it. Of the more than one and a half million properties on the National Register, 95,000 are listed individually. The remainder are contributing property, contributing resources within historic district (United States), historic districts. For the most of its history, the National Register has been administered by the National Park Service (NPS), an agency within the United States Department of the Interior. Its goals are to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
United States Coast Guard
The United States Coast Guard (USCG) is the maritime security, search and rescue, and Admiralty law, law enforcement military branch, service branch of the armed forces of the United States. It is one of the country's eight Uniformed services of the United States, uniformed services. The service is a maritime, military, multi-mission service unique among the United States military branches for having a maritime law enforcement mission with jurisdiction in both domestic and international waters and a Federal government of the United States, federal regulatory agency mission as part of its duties. It is the largest coast guard in the world, rivaling the capabilities and size of most Navy, navies. The U.S. Coast Guard protects the United States' borders and economic and security interests abroad; and defends its sovereignty by safeguarding sea lines of communication and commerce across U.S. territorial waters and its Exclusive economic zone, Exclusive Economic Zone. Due to ever-ex ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Fresnel Lens
A Fresnel lens ( ; ; or ) is a type of composite compact lens (optics), lens which reduces the amount of material required compared to a conventional lens by dividing the lens into a set of concentric annular sections. The simpler Dioptrics, dioptric (purely refraction, refractive) form of the lens was first proposed by Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon, and independently reinvented by the French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel (1788–1827) for use in lighthouses. The Catadioptric system, catadioptric (combining refraction and reflection) form of the lens, entirely invented by Fresnel, has outer Prism (optics), prismatic elements that use total internal reflection as well as refraction to capture more oblique light from the light source and add it to the beam, making it visible at greater distances. The design allows the construction of lenses of large aperture and short focal length without the mass and volume of material that would be required by a lens of conventional ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mobile Point Range Lights
The Mobile Point Range Lights were a series of lighthouses at the entrance to Mobile Bay, at Mobile Point on the tip of the Fort Morgan peninsula, near Mobile, Alabama, United States. The first lighthouse was built as a landfall light by June 1822 at a cost of $9,995. The lighthouse was a conical brick masonry tower, tall. It was first lit on 29 September 1822. Fort Morgan was built adjacent to the lighthouse in 1833. The lighthouse was joined by the Sand Island Light across the mouth of the bay, about away in 1858. This resulted in the Mobile Point Lighthouse being downgraded to a harbor light, at the same time a fourth order Fresnel lens was installed. A period photograph (see infobox), taken prior to the American Civil War, shows two shorter masonry towers standing on the beach below the main tower, they served as range lights. The lighthouse was subsequently destroyed by cannonball fire in the Battle of Mobile Bay during the Civil War. After the war, a temporary w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Sand Island Light (Alabama)
Sand Island Light, also known as Sand Island Lighthouse (and historical light station), is a decommissioned lighthouse located at the southernmost point of the state of Alabama, United States, near Dauphin Island, at the mouth of Mobile Bay, Alabama, United States. It is located roughly offshore from the primary Mobile Bay entrance, bounded on the east by Mobile Point and on the west by Dauphin Island, Alabama, Dauphin Island. The lighthouse is high. History The first lighthouse on Sand Island, constructed by Winslow Lewis in 1837, was a structure completed in 1839. The lighting was provided by 14 lamps in 16-inch reflectors and a first-order lens, known as the Lewis lamp, which was a poorly designed version, or Argand lamp, Argand-style lamp. Lewis enjoyed a monopoly through his relationship with Stephen Pleasonton that lasted until 1853. In 1859 a new lighthouse was completed but was destroyed during the Civil War, on February 23, 1863, by Confederate John W. Glenn. After t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Lighthouses In The United States
This is a list of lighthouses in the United States. The United States has had approximately a thousand lights as well as light towers, range lights, and pier head lights. Michigan has the most lights of any state with over 150 past and present lights. Lighthouses that are in former U.S. territories are not listed here. Most of the lights in the United States have been built and maintained by the Coast Guard (since 1939) and its predecessors, the United States Lighthouse Service (1910–1939) and the United States Lighthouse Board (1852–1910). Before the Lighthouse Board was established, local collectors of customs were responsible for lighthouses under Stephen Pleasonton. As their importance to navigation has declined and as public interest in them has increased, the Coast Guard has been handing over ownership and in some cases responsibility for running them to other parties, the chief of them being the National Park Service under the National Historic Lighthouse Preserva ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Lighthouses Completed In 1885
A lighthouse is a tower, building, or other type of physical structure designed to emit light from a system of lamps and lenses and to serve as a beacon for navigational aid for maritime pilots at sea or on inland waterways. Lighthouses mark dangerous coastlines, hazardous shoals, reefs, rocks, and safe entries to harbors; they also assist in aerial navigation. Once widely used, the number of operational lighthouses has declined due to the expense of maintenance and the advent of much cheaper, more sophisticated, and more effective electronic navigational systems. History Ancient lighthouses Before the development of clearly defined ports, mariners were guided by fires built on hilltops. Since elevating the fire would improve visibility, placing the fire on a platform became a practice that led to the development of the lighthouse. In antiquity, the lighthouse functioned more as an entrance marker to ports than as a warning signal for reefs and promontories, unlike many moder ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
