St. Augustine, FL

St.  Augustine Lighthouse & Maritime Museum

2nd St Augustine Lighthouse

The original lighthouse was washed out to sea in 1868 along with 1/2 mile of beach for 2 miles.

The black and white stripes and red top let sailors know they are off St. Augustine.  It's called a daymark and each lighthouse is unique so sailors can tell them apart.  No other lighthouse has this color scheme.

The lighthouse is 165' tall and has 219 steps to the observation deck. It was first lit in 1874.

The keepers house had up to 3 lighthouse keepers and their families that lived in the home.  It housed up to 15 people at any given time.  

This is the original keepers house that was gutted by fire in the 1970s and restored.

Augustin Fresnel, a French physicist/mathematician, developed a lens system in the early 19th century to redirect more light from a light source than ever before. His invention, called the Fresnel lens, redirects more light than the previous mirror-based devices.

The Fresnel lens includes prisms above and below the light source, which redirect the light that would be lost into the sky or down into the base of the lighthouse, straight out to the horizon. The rays leave the lighthouse in parallel lines, eliminating diffusion and magnifying the light source out to the horizon, often 20 to 30 miles away depending on the height of the lighthouse tower.

In 1874, when first installed, a clockwork mechanism rotated the lens once every nine minutes, displaying a flash every three minutes. Today, with an electric motor, these flashes appear every 30 seconds.

The St. Augustine lighthouse Fresnel lens is still turning, sending  light 20 miles out to sea. 

I personally think these Fresnel lenses are beautiful pieces of art.

What do you think?

Here's an interesting World War II fact that President Franklin Roosevelt attempted to keep secret about the threat to America.  Only six hours after the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hi on December 7, 1941, Hitler sent six U-boats from a port in occupied France to attack the east cost of the US. 

On April 11, 1942 the tanker SS Gulfamerica was hit by torpedoes as it pushed past Jacksonville Beach on the way to NYC with a load of furnace oil.

A coastal blackout was issued following the attack to decrease the ability of Nazi U-boat Captains to target allied ships silhouetted against coastal lights.  The lights went out for three miles in-land.

Did you know that in Florida waters alone, 24 ships were sunk by U-boats? 

Nazi agents also landed a rubber boat on Ponte Vedra Beach on June 17, 1942. Four Germans came ashore with orders to harm American infrastructure and utilities. The FBI captured them and they quickly faced the death penalty.